


Skin in the Game

by MaCall



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Aegon and Rhaenys Targaryen Live, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Twins, Childbirth, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dom/sub Undertones, Domeric Bolton Lives, Dragons, Emotional Manipulation, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Greenseeing, Hard Magic, Jon Snow is Not Called Aegon, Jon Snow is a Stark, Marriage of Convenience, Multi, Ned Stark Lives, Older Man/Younger Woman, POV Original Female Character, POV Third Person Plural, Past Tense, Political Alliances, Possessive Behavior, Pregnancy, Rewrite, Roose Bolton is His Own Warning, Sign Language, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Warging, Westerosi Politics, White Walkers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:49:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 38
Words: 167,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21599728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaCall/pseuds/MaCall
Summary: “A woman’s life is nine parts mess to one part magic, you’ll learn that soon enough…and the parts that look like magic often turn out to be messiest of all.”—George R. R. Martin,A Clash of KingsRoose Bolton unrolled a piece of parchment and dipped his raven feather quill into a glass inkwell with a silver lid that shone in the candlelight. “You must think me a monster, my lady,” he murmured.“I do not believe that being a monster is such a bad thing.” Wynne delicately moved across his solar to stand in front of his desk, her heart beating harder with every step toward him that she took. “One woman’s monster is oft another woman’s beloved.”Wynne Dustin thought her greensight was more of a curse than a blessing until she changed her favorite cousin’s grisly fate. If forewarned is forearmed, then she might be able to destroy the inhuman monsters beyond the Wall and win the prophesized War for the Dawn. Roose Bolton learning her darkest secret and offering to wed her was something she never saw coming.
Relationships: Domeric Bolton/Sansa Stark, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Roose Bolton/Original Female Character(s), Stannis Baratheon/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 248
Kudos: 326





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

>   
  
  


**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Prologue
> 
> Lady Wynne Dustin is visited by her favorite cousin, who comes bearing unwanted suitors and a favor to ask of her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wasn’t planning on posting my self-indulgent af _A Song of Ice and Fire_ rewrite since the show ended so inconsistently and GRRM hasn’t finished the series yet, but I changed my mind because I wrote a novel-length thing and I wanted to share it with anyone who might like to read it. YEET.
> 
> **CONTENT WARNING**: This fic contains an overpowered female protagonist. Wynne may be considered too unpalatable or unrealistic for many readers, especially readers whose preferences were shaped by a fandom culture in which original female characters are considered inferior and writing about powerful women is deemed less valid than any other form of wish-fulfillment in fanfic. I acknowledge that my form of storytelling isn’t for everyone, and I do not accept criticism unless it’s being offered by people whose opinions I trust, i.e. not random strangers on the internet. Please respond accordingly. Or don’t. All of the ~problematic~ subject matter that canonically exists in _A Song of Ice and Fire_ and _Game of Thrones_ is contained within, e.g. gratuitous violence, rape culture in a setting where rape culture isn’t a thing people are truly cognizant of and women have no bodily autonomy or legal personhood, copious misogyny, class disparity within a pseudo-medieval feudal hierarchy, child brides, pedophilia, incest, slavery, blood and gore, torture, etc. Hence the [Dead Dove: Do Not Eat](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Dead_Dove:_Do_Not_Eat) tag, even though I do explicitly condemn many of those aspects of the story. This fic is rated M for a reason. Proceed with caution.
> 
> This fic is also a chronological amalgam of book and show canon. I shortened the rule of Aerys II by two years instead of retconning the rule of Jaehaerys II, who reigned from 259 AC until 262 AC. Major historical events include:
> 
> **Dance of the Dragons**: 129 AC-131 AC.  
**Conquest of Dorne**: 157 AC-161 AC.  
**First Blackfyre Rebellion**: 196 AC.  
**Year of the Great Spring Sickness**: 209 AC.  
**Second Blackfyre Rebellion**: 212 AC.  
**Third Blackfyre Rebellion**: 219 AC.  
**Fourth Blackfyre Rebellion**: 236 AC.  
**Tragedy at Summerhall**: 259 AC.  
**War of the Ninepenny Kings**: 260 AC.  
**Reyne-Tarbeck Uprising**: 261 AC.  
**Defiance of Duskendale**: 277 AC.  
**Year of the False Spring**: 279 AC.  
**Robert’s Rebellion**: 280 AC-281 AC.  
**Beginning of the Long Summer**: 288 AC.  
**Greyjoy Rebellion**: 289 AC.

**Learn to see with your heart, not with your eyes.**

Alyson Noël, _Cruel Summer_

* * *

**☙ Ⅰ ❧**

297 AC

_At Barrow Hall, the ancestral seat of House Dustin, in the wooden city of Barrowton, on the banks of the Burn of Barrow in the Barrowlands of the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

It dawned a harsh grey summer morning on the day her cousin arrived in Barrowton. Fragments of the sun brightly shone through pale clouds like radiant thorns in the sky above the square wooden towers where the banners of her late father and lady mother flew, the light glinting on the surface of the water in the rivers that flowed south into the Saltspear while the wind howled over the keep and swept the fields of farmland both fallow and fertile and plains sprouted with the barrows of the Barrowlands. Colorful flower garlands and floral arrangements were festooned over the wooden city during the annual festival of flowers, a weeklong celebration of vegetation and fertility that brought people from all over the North to Barrowton.

House Dustin was heralded by a crowned pair of crossed bronze longaxes with black shafts on gold, and Lady Barbrey had quartered that sigil with the golden horsehead with red eyes and a red mane on bronze with a black engrailed border. Lord Rodrik had altered the color of his sigil in his personal coat-of-arms. Roger Ryswell, her eldest uncle and heir to the Rills, bore the black horsehead on his banners. Rickard Ryswell, his younger twin brother, bore a grey horsehead on his. Roose Ryswell, their youngest brother, bore a brown horsehead on his banners. When she hosted her father and brothers, Lady Barbrey flew those banners from the watchtowers built into the wall surrounding the prominent town of Barrowton. Barrow Hall, the castle made of wood that stood atop the Great Barrow, always bore the banners of its lord and lady even though its lord had been dead almost as long as his only daughter and heir to his keep had been alive.

Wynne Dustin never had a chance to know her father. She knew his name had been Willam Dustin, Lord of Barrowton and Warden of the Saltspear. She knew all of the stories his cousin Ser Addam had told her before he died by heart. She knew her mother had given him a red stallion, the finest horse in the Ryswell family herds, and he had promised he would return home to her mounted on that courser. She knew he survived the Battle of the Bells. She knew he was knighted by the uncrowned King Robert Baratheon, First of His Name, after he saved the life of Lord Hoster Tully during the Battle of the Trident and slew the Lord of Griffin’s Roost. She knew he died at the Tower of Joy in Dorne, where Lord Eddard Stark had buried his bones in a cairn made of stones from the joyless tower instead of bringing all that was left of him home to her mother where he belonged. She knew their dour liege had returned the horse, a promise broken.

Barbrey Dustin, her lady mother, never remarried. Wynne knew it was because her mother had loved her father, but it was also because Lady Barbrey only had a claim to her lands and titles as the widow of the rightful Lord of Barrowton and she had vowed to never become the property of another man again. Brandon Stark, the elder brother of Lord Eddard Stark, had sired two bastard children on her before he died, even though he was betrothed to a maiden from the Riverlands. Melantha Snow, called Mel by her friends and Ice Bitch by her enemies, was a year older than Wynne. Cregard was three years older. Rodrik Ryswell, her grandfather and Lord of the Rills, had betrothed his daughter to Willam by arguing that her fertility had been proven after Mel was born. Brandon had never stayed with her long enough to meet either of his children, but Willam had been there for Barbrey for every bit of her second pregnancy. Willam had even stayed with her in the birthing room. She knew her father would have stayed in the birthing room during her mother’s third pregnancy as well, if he’d lived. Instead her aunt Bethany and her grandmother Wylma had stayed with her mother. Lady Barbrey distrusted maesters and she kept faith with the old gods, so her midwife had been a woods-witch named Salvia. Wynne came screaming into the world midway through a war, but as she grew she learned how to be so quiet that nobody saw her for what she truly was. Lady Barbrey still couldn’t look at her children without seeing the ghosts of their fathers, each of whom had broken her heart in his own way.

Wynne tilted her head up and watched as a page raised the personal coat-of-arms belonging to her cousin above the tower by the northeastern gate: a red flayed man on pink festooned with red drops of blood, the sigil of House Bolton, quartered with the black horsehead on bronze of House Ryswell for his late mother. She grinned wide at the grisly sight of the flayed men and ran along the wall from the eastern tower to the northeastern gate, the skirts of her gown and kirtle flapping awkwardly in the wind and with the force of her footfalls as her thick ocherous braid flickered behind her and her eyeglasses fogged up from the heat of her breath mingling with the summer air. Wynne scarcely took notice of the men-at-arms who turned and looked at her as she floated past, swift as a fleeting gale of wind.

Domeric Bolton was her favorite cousin, and she had a great many cousins to choose from. Domeric was a quiet boy, he loved horses and history books, he played the high harp, and he dreamed of being a knight. Domeric had entered the lists in King’s Landing at a tourney held three years prior, and he was unhorsed in his second tilt against Barristan the Bold. It was quite a feat to joust with Ser Barristan Selmy and stay ahorse, if only for a tilt and a half.

Roose Bolton, his lord father, disapproved of his knightly aspirations. Chivalry and knighthood were trappings of the Andals, and true northmen were of the First Men. Lord Bolton had still permitted Domeric to serve four years as a page for Lady Barbrey in Barrowton and three years as a squire for the Lord of the Redfort. House Redfort and House Royce were kin to House Bolton, and they had intermarried since before the coming of the Andals four thousand years ago. Horton Redfort had been wed thrice and widowed twice. Rhonda, his second wife, was a Bolton and she had birthed him two sons before she died of childbed fever. Bronze Yohn Royce wed Lady Roxane Bolton, who birthed him three sons and four daughters. Wynne had missed her cousin terribly during those years. She wrote to him once a month, since the ravens took weeks to wing their words from one kingdom to another.

When she reached the northeastern tower, Wynne slowed and caught her breath so that she would not embarrass herself with unladylike panting and wheezing. There were no banners with the flayed man of House Bolton unquartered, so her uncle had remained at the Dreadfort. _Good_, she thought. Roose Bolton was a cold man with eyes like shards of winter and a quiet deep voice made for whispers and lies, and he was called the Leech Lord because he believed that periodic bloodletting improved his health. Domeric had the same pale eyes, but he was always smiling with a warmth that made them seem less frozen over. Roose Bolton sometimes bared his teeth, but she had never seen him smile. It was unnerving. _Uncle_ was not the proper term for the man, either. Domeric was still her cousin, but Roose Bolton was no longer married to her aunt—they shared no blood ties beyond the consanguinity that bound every house in the North into an uneasy coexistence of peace. Rogar Bolton, the last Red King who ruled from the seat of the Dreadfort before the coming of the Andals, had married a princess of House Dustin and bent the knee to Jon Stark, the King of Winter. Lady Barba Bolton, her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, had married Lord Bennifer Dustin, her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, after she attended the so-called Maiden’s Day Cattle Show to ask that Aegon the Dragonbane send a supply train of food home with her because winter had come and people in the North were starving. It had been six generations since House Dustin and House Bolton had intermarried.

Roose Bolton had sporadically come to visit her mother since her aunt Bethany died of summer fever. After she caught him exiting her mother’s bedchamber one evening at the hour of the nightingale, he put a finger to his lips and hushed her before he bared his teeth in something that might’ve been a blade of a smile. Wynne had been a girl of twelve, all sharp elbows and unruly curls and unwieldy breasts that were growing so fast they gouged pink stretch marks into her pale skin. It had been almost five years since then and she was a woman grown now; she wore fitted kirtles over her chemise and underneath her gowns to keep her breasts from making nuisances of themselves, but she had never outgrown the sharp elbows.

Domeric walked his courser for a mile before he halted in front of the northeastern gate. There were buckets of water from the rivers waiting inside the gates for the hot horses. If horses drank a whole bucket of water in the aftermath of a long hard ride, they must then drink another to prevent dehydration. This was something that all Ryswells knew, after centuries of breeding the best horses in the North. Domeric had brought a Bolton man-at-arms with him, along with two knights and their squires who bore the banners of House Redfort: a red castle on a field of white in a red embattled border.

Wynne resisted the urge to roll her eyes as her cousin approached. Domeric had written her about his foster brothers Ser Creighton and Ser Jon, the second and third sons of Lord Redfort, after she came of age almost a year ago. Wynne had no intention of marrying a southron knight, and as the heir to Barrowton she had too many northern suitors to choose from already. Eddard, Torrhen and Harald, the second, third and fourth sons of Lord Rickard Karstark. Osric, the second son of Lord Greatjon Umber. Edrick, the second son of Lord Ondrew Locke of Oldcastle. Ronnel Stout, the only son of Harwood Stout, Lord of Goldgrass and vassal of Lady Barbrey. Artos Flint, second son of Lord Torghen Flint. Gregor Forrester, the Lord of Ironrath, had offered his third and fourth sons, Ethan and Ryon. Arnolf Karstark, uncle of Lord Rickard, had offered her a son or grandson of her choosing. There were eight of them: Cregan, Arthor, Karlon, Arnold, Harlon, Errold, Dorren, and Jonnel. Ludd Whitehill, the Lord of Highpoint, had offered his third and fourth sons, Torrhen and Gryff. Lord Rodrik, her grandfather, had offered her distant Ryswell cousins named Reynard, Rostik, Radomir, and Rhys.

Lady Barbrey had told Wynne that she would never force any child of hers to marry. It would be her choice, and hers alone. Wynne had thus far chosen not to marry, because her suitors and their fathers all saw her as a lordship with a young cunt attached. Domeric should have gotten the hint after she never responded to correspondence from either of his foster brothers. Alas, her favorite cousin was a lordling and heir to a great keep—albeit one with a gory and gruesome history—and he never learned how to hear the word _No_.

Domeric smiled at her before he dismounted and handed the reins of his courser off to one of the stableboys. Then he bowed to her with a flourish of his cloak, gallant as ever; he wore a pink woolen cloak studded with garnet drops, a red boiled leather jerkin, a black velvet doublet, black riding breeches and boots, his long black hair braided at his temples and tied behind his head with dark red silk ribbon. Domeric had a pointed chin and grey eyes like his father, but he had fuller lips and warm ivory skin like most of the Ryswells; the smile that shone on his face was all his own, quiet and crooked and sweet. “My lady,” he said, “may I present my foster brothers Ser Creighton and Ser Jon of House Redfort, their squires, Alester of House Waynwood and Oswin of House Belmore, and I am certain you remember my man-at-arms.”

Wynne nodded, a sharp descent of her stubborn chin. “Skinner,” she said, “the one who refused to tell me his true name even though I beat him in a game of dice. I remember.”

“Aye.” Skinner dismounted and led his steed to the buckets of water. “Those in service at the Dreadfort have no true names but the one Lord Bolton gave us, m’lady.”

Wynne hummed, a soft noise that snarled in her throat. “So you said.” Then her gaze fell upon Ser Creighton and Ser Jon, sighing internally as their eyes strayed below the neckline of her gown. “Sers,” she said, “I am Wynne of House Dustin, heir to Barrowton, daughter of Barbrey of House Ryswell and House Dustin, Lady of Barrowton and Wardeness of the Saltspear. Be welcome in our halls and at our table.”

Lady Barbrey stood beside the hearth in her woolen widow’s weeds, dressed all in black and unadorned by gold or jewels; her greying brown hair was braided and tied back in a widow’s knot, and she had a refined beauty and dignity she carried as visibly as the faint wrinkles around her eyes. There was not much resemblance between Wynne and her mother. Lady Barbrey was tall and slim, with dark hair and brown eyes while her daughter was short of stature and voluptuous with hair like polished brass and hazel eyes. However, they possessed the same aplomb, and both mother and daughter had tongues as sharp as the blades of House Bolton.

“Be welcome as our guests,” Lady Barbrey said. “Enjoy the festivities, but do not presume to court my daughter. I will not serve up her maidenhead to southron knights just because my favorite nephew was fostered with your lord father.”

Wynne snorted and stifled a smile as one of the kitchen boys served the customary bread and salt along with a pitcher of water and slices of lemons grown in the glass gardens of Barrowton, heated by natural hot springs that warmed the wooden town. Most keeps in the North were built atop natural hotspots, not just Winterfell.

Domeric looked abashed. “We thank you for your hospitality,” he said and both of his foster brothers echoed the courtesy.

Wynne sat at the high table with a book and waited for Domeric to come to her while she nibbled on soft cheese and fresh white bread sweetened with cinnamon and baked with chopped black walnuts. Ser Creighton found her first. Wynne arched one eyebrow at him and the words he opened his mouth to say withered in his throat.

“You might give him a chance,” Domeric said and watched his friends sit dejectedly at the other end of the high table before he folded himself into the seat across from her.

Wynne rolled her eyes, but did not look up from _Dragonkin, Being a History of House Targaryen from Exile to Apotheosis, with a Consideration of the Life and Death of Dragons _by Maester Thomax. “Do you know how many noblemen have attempted to court me since I came of age a year ago?” she asked him. “I have two dozen suitors, Domeric. It would be flattering if they actually wanted _me_, but what they want is the Barrowlands. I am the only chance for all the second, third, and fourth sons in the North to snag a lordship and a wardenship. I’d sooner marry one of your father’s white leeches than any of them or either of your foster brothers. I want someone who sees me for myself, not my title. Lord Walder Frey offered me any unwed son or grandson or great-grandson of his, you know. I was almost tempted to marry a Frey out of spite, but my grandfather offered to marry my uncle Roger to his great-granddaughter ‘Fair’ Walda, my uncle Rickard to his daughter Tyta the Maid, my uncle Roose to his granddaughter Alyx, and to foster a few of his grandsons and great-grandsons instead. So now my mother is going to have a new page: a boy named Waltyr Frey, twenty-first son of Lord Walder. Tyr, he’s called.”

Domeric cut himself a slice of bread and popped a piece of cheese into his mouth. “I didn’t only invite them here to woo my favorite cousin,” he told her. “I’ve _missed _them, Wynnie.”

Wynne huffed at her childhood nickname. Wynnie, phonetically the same as _whinny_, a sound that horses made. “What of your brother Ramsay?” she wanted to know. Mel was her sister and Cregard was her brother, bastards or not. Lady Barbrey had raised her children as siblings, not half-siblings.

Domeric fidgeted with the half-eaten slice of bread in his hands. “I have not had the courage to ride up the Weeping Water and meet him and his mother,” he admitted, “I hoped you would accompany me. Father has forbidden me from seeking Ramsay out, but he is my brother. I know you of all people understand what having a living brother would mean to me.”

Wynne looked up from her book and narrowed her eyes at him behind her eyeglasses. Cregard had been wed to their cousin Raelyne, so his children would not be named Snow, and Mel had been fostered with Maege Mormont, the Lady of Bear Island. Cregard was never far since he lived in the Rills, but Mel had liked Bear Island so much she decided to stay at Mormont Keep and she had not returned to Barrowton in over a decade. Cregard had never been a wordsmith but he took every opportunity to visit, while Mel wrote to her mother and sister often. Wynne knew her siblings had never resented her because their mother had never lorded her trueborn heir over them. Ramsay Snow was not her siblings, however. “There is a difference between my siblings and your brother,” she retorted. “Brandon Stark told my mother he loved her and perhaps he lied to get between her legs, but she was always willing to bed him and bear his children with or without a sacred vow spoken in the sight of the gods before a heart tree. Cregard and Mel are my brother and sister for true not because we share the same blood but because my mother made certain of it by raising all three of us as with equal amounts of love and bitterness over the deaths of our fathers. Ramsay is the baseborn son of your father and a woman he raped, after he murdered her husband for wedding her without his consent. What makes you think he wants to be your brother? Ramsay could hate you, for all you know of him. I am certain his mother hates your father.”

“It was his due,” Domeric said, “she was his by right.”

Wynne snorted. _How strange_, she thought, _he speaks and Lord Bolton’s words come oozing out of his mouth. I can almost hear the quiet cadence of his voice_. “Jaehaerys the Conciliator outlawed the first night right in 58 AC. It was rape.”

Domeric looked at her with pale eyes as frostbitten as his father’s before he unclenched his jaw and squared his shoulders. “Please, Wynnie,” he whispered. “Whether he hates me for what our father did to his mother or no, Ramsay is my brother. I want him by my side. Will you come and meet him with me?”

Wynne bit her bottom lip and gnawed without breaking the skin. “Do not make me regret it,” she whispered back.


	2. No Tales Were Ever Told {I}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 1: No Tales Were Ever Told {I}
> 
> Wynne visits the Dreadfort and is reintroduced to its lord, to whom she feels disturbingly attracted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wynne mentions the _filius philosophorum_, an alchemical symbol described by Carl G. Jung as the “light-bringer” in his essay “The Spirit Mercurius” (1953). It literally means “philosopher’s child” and is sometimes equated with the philosopher’s stone, or a homunculus. This symbol was interpreted by Jung as a messianic figure or archetype similar to how GRRM characterizes Azor Ahai.

**You ask me to speak your name**   
**in the future tense and so I**   
**say _want_.**

Wendy Xu, “Nightly the Tender Throat”

* * *

**☙ ⅠⅠ ❧**

297 AC

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

Domeric had ridden off four moonturns ago to visit the Redfort and Barrowton, and in the aftermath of the festival of flowers he returned with the most exquisite maiden that Roose had ever set eyes on: smooth pale skin like fresh milk glowing with a pink flush, hair gleaming like polished brass, a pert nose upon which perched a pair of eyeglasses with owlish bronze frames, and a sweet full mouth. Younger than his son but a woman grown, and highborn for certain. Domeric helped her dismount from her mare, a fine sorrel that could only be from the prize Ryswell herds. Was this one of his cousins from the Rills? Roose had never seen a Ryswell with red hair. Lady Bethany and Lady Dustin both had dark brown hair, gilded umber in the right slant of flickering candlelight.

_I want her_, he thought, _and I cannot have her. Domeric has brought her home to ask my permission to wed her and make the girl his bride, like as not_.

There was a pair of knights with him as well, their squires flying the red and white banners of House Redfort. Skinner bore the quartered Bolton and Ryswell coat-of-arms for his son. No one bore _her_ banners, but she had a lady-in-waiting and three men-at-arms with her and the men all wore steel ringmail and boiled leather armor stamped with the crowned and crossed battle-axes of House Dustin. Lady Barbrey had a female heir, but such a fair maiden could not be the same awkward plump little girl who caught him sneaking out of her mother’s bedchamber five years ago. Wynne Dustin had been all elbows and hunched pale shoulders and tangled curls, an odd little beast with her nose always in a book—

“Father,” Domeric said and smiled with a warmth that made even a man such as Roose feel a thaw, “may I present my cousin Lady Wynne of House Dustin, her handmaiden Lady Ellara of House Stout, her guards Serjeant Beron, Elric, called Ric, and Edric, called Ned, my foster brothers Ser Creighton and Ser Jon of House Redfort, and their squires, Alester of House Waynwood and Oswin of House Belmore.”

Wynne curtsied to him, courteous and elegant. There was nothing odd or beastly about her any longer. Wynne had ample white breasts, a small waist, and shapely hips from what he saw beneath her woolen sable cloak trimmed with ermine and lambswool riding gown, and she comported herself in a manner that spoke of fastidiously cultivated refinement. This was a girl who knew her place in the world all too well and acted accordingly. Wynne tilted her chin up and looked into his eyes, her gaze a visible evaluation. “Lord Bolton,” she murmured.

Roose acknowledged her greeting with a brusque nod and extended his hand to her. Wynne offered her own hand to him and he grasped her fingers before he kissed her knuckles with dry lips, softly. Roose held her gaze and smiled at the blush that seeped into her pale cheeks as she tilted her chin up and stared back at him.

_Pretty eyes_, he thought. Hazel flecked with bright green and gold, autumnal and augmented by long eyelashes. “My lady,” he said, “welcome to the Dreadfort.”

Roose Bolton had actually smiled at her, and it hadn’t been as terrifying as she thought it might be. Those cold pale eyes of his glittered like moonglow when he smiled. Wynne tucked her hand in the crook of his elbow when he offered to escort her inside, her knuckles still tingling from the gentle pressure of his mouth. Domeric always braided his long black hair, but Lord Bolton wore his hair short. It was untouched by threads of silver or patches of grey.

Lord Bolton was past forty, but he looked oddly ageless. There were no lines on his face, no evidence of the passage of time etched into his skin; his age had only added self-possession and sophistication. Lord Bolton kept his face shaved clean. It was a pallid face, with thin lips and a pointed chin and a sharp aquiline blade of a nose. Not conventionally handsome, but striking in its impassivity. Almost disturbing. In his eyes lurked a cunning intelligence, harsh and implacable and cruel. When he spoke, larger men quieted to listen. It made him seem taller, though he was lean and of average height for a man of the North. There had been a chilling expression on his face, as if he’d seen everything the world had to offer and deemed none of it worth a second look.

Until he’d set eyes on her.

“So,” he said in his quiet deep voice, “did my son bring you here to wed you, my lady?”

Wynne stifled an unladylike snort at the question as she attempted to ignore the eerie thrill coiling in the soft pit of her stomach, the fine hairs on the nape of her neck rising with an acute awareness of him. It was not uncommon for noble families to wed cousin to cousin, so the question wasn’t unexpected. Addam had been her father’s cousin, and he was the man she had always thought she would marry until he rode off to fight outlaws south of the Neck and never returned. Rickard Stark wed Lyarra Stark, his father’s cousin. Lord Bolton had been wed at sixteen to his cousin Lady Romilda Royce, who died in the same epidemic of winter fever that had killed his father, Lord Robar. Roose Bolton had become the Lord of the Dreadfort at seventeen, when he was her age.

“Alas,” Domeric said, “my cousin has two dozen suitors already without me joining in the fray.”

Wynne scowled at him before she answered his father’s question in her own words. “Barrowton has two dozen suitors, my lord. I told Domeric that I’d sooner marry one of your white leeches. Do you have one that would suit?”

Lord Bolton laughed. “When you were a babe,” he told her, “your mother was plagued by suitors who circled her as crows do carrion after wars are waged and only the dead are left rotting in the fields of battle. Lady Dustin was never so lovely as you, however.”

Wynne shrugged, the sensation inside her raw and disquieting. “If you thought her uncomely,” she whispered so only he might hear, “why did you crawl into her bed five years ago?”

“I craved for solace,” Roose Bolton whispered back as the solid iron doors of the Dreadfort opened up and swallowed them whole, “and sex is one way to soothe all the rage and pain. Frequent bloodletting is another.”

Wynne had not expected him to answer honestly. Lord Bolton was many things, but he was not an honest man unless it suited his purposes. Wynne slipped her hand out from where her fingers had curled into the crook of his elbow as they entered the great hall and eyed the torches that were held by rows of skeletal arms reaching out of the thick stone walls in pairs of right and left hands. “Are those real?” she asked in morbid fascination.

“They are,” Lord Bolton said and leaned in so he could whisper, “Maegor the Cruel beheaded every stonemason, woodworker, and builder who constructed the Red Keep so only he would know all of its secrets. I was named for King Roose of House Bolton, First of His Name, the Red King who built the Dreadfort on top of fissure vents that we use to keep the castle warm and ruled over the lands of the North from the Last River to the White Knife. When he built the great hall, he imprisoned his enemies within the walls.”

Wynne adjusted her eyeglasses with two fingertips. “King Brandon Stark, called Ice Eyes, was half Bolton,” she whispered back, “he recaptured the Wolf’s Den from slavers. Whom he stripped naked and left in the dungeon with the slaves he freed.”

Edrick Snowbeard had lost the Wolf’s Den to slavers from the Stepstones once he grew old and feeble. King Ice Eyes was the great-grandson of King Edrick and the son of Harlon Stark, the King in the North who laid siege to the Dreadfort hundreds of years ago. It took him over two years to starve them out. House Bolton surrendered, and King Harlon made Ryana Bolton his queen.

Roose made a soft noise in response and Wynne felt his breath hot on her neck and the shell of her ear, his quiet deep voice made her shiver. It was unnerving, that ghostly heat. Roose Bolton had always been a creature of ice and cold, but he was still a man and now she was all too aware of that.

* * *

Wynne curtsied to him once more with perfect courtesy and left the great hall to bathe and change out of her riding gown before the feast, along with the knights and men-at-arms until two Bolton men were all that remained in the great hall. Domeric was glowering at him when he turned and looked at his only living trueborn son. Roose sighed. “If you have something to say,” he murmured, “then say it.”

“You were _flirting_ with her,” Domeric quietly accused.

Roose shrugged, but did not deny it. “I am not too old to woo a woman,” he said mildly, “and your cousin is a lady worth the effort of wooing. Unless you do intend to marry her. Only a fool would cuckold his son, and I am not foolish. I do not wish to breed resentment between us, Domeric.”

Domeric shook his head slowly and his mouth pinched with disquiet before he spoke. “Wynne is the closest thing I have to a sister,” he muttered petulantly, “not a woman that you of all men should be wooing.”

Roose scoffed. “Do not presume to command me,” he said in his softest, deadliest voice, “you are not yet the Lord of the Dreadfort.”

“I am not _commanding_ you,” Domeric retorted, “I’m asking my father not to hurt my cousin the way I know you’ve hurt women in the past.”

Roose sighed again. If anyone else had spoken to him as such he would have their impudent tongue out, but Domeric was his son. Roose was proud of his many accomplishments, despite his impertinence. “Lady Wynne is not some miller’s wife,” he said, “she is the only daughter of the Lord of Barrowton and a granddaughter of the Lord of the Rills. Lady Wylma Ryswell, her grandmother, is the elder sister of Lord Wyman Manderly of White Harbor, who himself wed Lady Robyn of House Dustin. I do not intend to make enemies of three great noble houses by harming her.”

“What are your intentions, then?” Domeric asked.

Roose only smiled.

* * *

Ellara sent for a washbasin, not a tub. It was precisely what she needed, as expected of one who had known her all her life. Ellara had been her dearest friend and companion for as long as she could remember, and Wynne shuddered to think what she would do without her. Oddly enough, she reveled in childrearing despite never having borne a child herself. Ellara was of the most nurturing sort, to the extent that she gladly spent her childhood accomplishing the arduous task of keeping watch over the children whilst their lady mother went about the business of ruling Barrowton. Wynne combed scented water through her hair, scrubbed the sweat from her body, and changed into a white silk chemise and sheer silk stockings underneath warm socks made of lambswool tied at her knees with black silk ribbons. Then she painted her fingernails while Ellara painstakingly styled her hair and laced her into a bronze satin kirtle beneath a gown of black velvet embroidered with copper, gold, silver and bronze metallic thread. Its black sleeves were laced with golden silk ribbons above the cuffs buttoned at her wrists to below her elbows and from above her elbows to below her shoulders, where the satin of her kirtle was meant to peek through. Ellara had braided her hair and woven silver and gold ribbons into the soft brass tresses. Wynne felt beautiful until Domeric came to escort her from her chambers in one of the guest towers to the great hall.

“What do you think you’re wearing?” he asked her.

“…a gown?” Wynne answered him with a dash of sarcasm adding an acerbic bite to her confusion.

“_Why?_” Domeric asked, his quiet voice laden with meaning that she could not decipher.

Wynne arched one eyebrow at him. “Because your father is a lord hosting a welcome feast and I am a highborn lady attending the aforementioned feast,” she deadpanned. “Would you rather I went in the nude?”

Domeric shook his head and pinched his lips together in the manner he always did before he blurted out something that he should have thought better of saying. “My lord father _wants_ you,” he told her.

Wynne closed her mouth to avoid gaping at her cousin and possibly attracting flies. _I know he kissed my hand_, she thought, _but that was something lords do out of courtesy. It doesn’t mean he wants me. Domeric must be wrong, because if he’s right, then I’m not safe. If Roose Bolton wants me, he won’t stop until he has me. Whether I consent to being his or not_. It sent a thrilling chill shivering through her from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine before the sensation coiled deep inside her, tight like a trap ready to spring.

“So you shouldn’t be wearing your finest gown,” Domeric said, oblivious to the deluge of her thoughts that threatened to drown her.

Wynne huffed. “My finest gown is green samite and black velvet trimmed and paneled in gold Myrish lace,” she informed him. “I wore _this_ gown because it has all the colors of House Dustin and House Ryswell: black, gold, and bronze. If your father wants me, he won’t care what sort of gown I’m wearing.”

Domeric narrowed his eyes at her and scrutinized her impassive expression before he offered his arm to her. “I won’t let him touch you,” he whispered as she tucked her fingers into the bend of his elbow.

Wynne patted his forearm with her other hand. _What if I want him to touch me?_ some dark part of her inquired. Wynne ordered that dark part of her to shut up. “I don’t need you to protect me,” she whispered back.

It was customary for a lord or lady to feast highborn guests. Wynne had attended many a feast at Barrow Hall, in the Rills at Castle Ryder and each of the holdfasts ruled by her quarrelsome uncles, even at New Castle in White Harbor where her second cousins Wylla and Wynafryd lived with their father Ser Wylis and grandfather Lord Wyman. Dinner in the great hall of the Dreadfort was much the same. There was a high table on a dais where the lords and ladies sat above the long tables below, where soldiers and men-at-arms and serjeants and justicars and gaolers and torturers and carpenters and stonemasons and grooms and falconers and gardeners and seamstresses and chamberlains and laundresses and chambermaids ate together.

Roose Bolton sat in the center of the dais, the lord’s seat. Domeric would sit in the empty seat to his left. If her aunt Bethany were still alive, she would have sat in the empty chair to his right. Others sat along his side of the table: his steward, his marshal, his vassals—the lords of House Holt and House Waterman—and their wives. Ser Creighton was seated in the chair beside Domeric; Ser Jon sat beside him. Wynne sat in the chair that belonged to the Lady of the Dreadfort and tried not to read something into the seating arrangement. It was only proper for the heir to Barrowton to sit in a place of honor. Roose Bolton did not seat her in the place where his wives had once sat in order to make his intentions known. Lord Bolton was a monster, but he was always discreet where his amusements were concerned. There was nothing discreet about this.

She looked stunning in black, her vermeil hair luminous in the coruscating torchlight. With her seated as close as courtesy permitted, he caught the delicate scent of her: primrose oil and the sweet musk and faint salt of her skin. She made him salivate like some kind of base creature. Roose wondered if she tasted as good as her smell promised she would.

Wynne struck up a conversation with his steward about garnets and seemed genuinely fascinated by the information he shared with her. House Bolton owned and oversaw a dozen garnet mines and mills. While pure garnets were mined and fashioned as gemstones, most garnet was crushed and used to make abrasives like sandpaper.

There were a variety of garnets: almandine garnets ranged in color from vermillion to aubergine and were oft shaped and polished into cabochons instead of faceted. Pyrope garnets ranged in color from red to almost black and were called fire eye stones in the Old Tongue of the First Men. Rhodolite garnets ranged in color from rose pink to red, and they consisted of both pyrope and almandine. Spessartine garnets were crystals that ranged in color from ochre to vermillion. Andradite garnets came in three variants: black or titanian andradite, the valuable and verdant green demantoid, and rare chartreuse topazolite. Grossular garnets came in four variants: cinnamon brown hessonite, opaque pink rosolite, dark green viluite, and deep green tsavolite. Uvarovite garnets ranged in color from emerald green to almost black and consisted of both andradite and grossular.

Uthor, the maester in service at the Dreadfort, began to explain how various types of garnets were found in different mineral deposits and surface mining techniques versus underground mining.

Wynne cocked her head and chewed on her bottom lip in contemplation before she asked, “So the existence of garnet deposits in the North indicates that before the Long Night and the Battle for the Dawn, our climate was more temperate?”

Uthor beamed at her and nodded emphatically. “Yes,” he said, “precisely. There are some who believe the Others are merely a myth, but the hot springs and presence of certain minerals in our soil prove the Long Night had lasting repercussions on the North that irrevocably altered our lands.”

Roose grit his teeth and made a noise in the back of his throat reminiscent of a low growl. _Why couldn’t she be vapid? _he thought. Knowing she possessed a finely-honed mind in addition to her sharp tongue only inflamed his desire.

Wynne then began listing the variants on the legend of the Warrior of Fire, called the last hero by the First Men, Eldric Shadowchaser by the Andals, Azor Ahai by the Asshai’i, Hyrkoon the Hero by the people of Essos, Neferion by the people of Valyria, and Yin Tar by the YiTish and Lengii. “This suggests the legendary hero actually existed,” she hypothesized, “because the variations on the legend share common elements and themes even though it originated from before the coming of the Andals to Westeros and it arguably predates the rise of the dragonlords in Old Valyria and their conquest of Old Ghis. Furthermore, it corresponds with an anthropomorphized alchemical symbol known as the Child of Wisdom, the Child of the Egg, the Child of the Sun and Moon, or the Child of the Red King and the White Queen.”

“My lady,” Roose said, “do you know the legend of the Night’s King?”

Wynne hummed. “Once,” she told him in the hushed voice of a raconteur, “the fearless warrior named thirteenth Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch fell in love with a woman called the corpse queen with cold skin as white as the moon and eyes like blue stars. When he gave his seed to her, he gave his soul as well. They ruled the Nightfort for thirteen years, until Brandon the Breaker, the King of Winter, and Joramun, the King beyond the Wall, vanquished them with their combined might and freed the Night’s Watch from their misrule. All records of him were destroyed. Tales are still told of the atrocities he committed during his reign and of the sacrifices he made to the Others. Archmaesters have suggested that his corpse queen was actually the daughter of a Barrow King, since the Barrowlands are festooned with graves. There are regional variations in which the Night’s King was an Umber, a Bolton, a Flint, a Norrey, a Woodfoot, a Magnar, or a Stark.”

This led to a discussion of Brave Danny Flint and the Rat Cook, and other Nightfort tales. Roose ate slices of raw lemon and sucked the sour juice from the pulp and rinds as she began to compare the darker northern songs and stories with flowery southron tales: Serwyn of the Mirror Shield and Princess Daeryssa, Florian and Jonquil, Aemon the Dragonknight and Queen Naerys, the Prince of Dragonflies and Jenny of Oldstones.

Wynne sighed. “What people seem to forget,” she said, “is that southron tales are horrible too if you know how they end. Serwyn may have slain the dragon Urrax, but he was haunted by the ghosts of the knights he killed. Aegon the Unworthy was atrocious to Queen Naerys until the day she died in childbed, forcing her to share his bed and spreading lies about her infidelity while he fucked anything with a cunt and proclaimed his love for his mistresses at court for all to see. Prince Duncan Targaryen died at Summerhall and no one knows what happened to Jenny of Oldstones. Florian and Jonquil is the only story with a happy ending.”

“Florian the Fool is described as a knight even though his story predates the coming of the Andals,” Roose said, “he may never have existed at all.”

Wynne nodded succinctly. “I am certain the best stories are tales no one ever tells,” she murmured.


	3. No Tales Were Ever Told {II}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 2: No Tales Were Ever Told {II}
> 
> Domeric meets Ramsay. It doesn’t end well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wynne uses a wagoner’s axe called a doloire, characterized by a blade that was pointed at the top and rounded at the bottom. Most had five-foot shafts and were two-handed weapons, but smaller one-handed versions were also used. Their name derives from the Latin _dolabra_, a type of tool axe used by ancient Roman legionaries (i.e. infantrymen). It was a utilitarian tool, one used for building and woodworking that could also be used for self-defense. Wynne uses one with a spike instead of a hammer, specifically designed to pierce armor.

**There are no monsters in the world, and no saints. Only infinite shades woven into the same tapestry, light and dark. One man’s monster is another man’s beloved. The wise know that.**

Katherine Arden, _The Winter of the Witch_

* * *

**☙ ⅠⅠⅠ ❧**

297 AC

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

After the feast, Wynne inhaled the fumes of woodsmoke from the guttering torches and exhaled in a quiet gust through her mouth as the sense of foreboding she felt all the way from Barrow Hall to the Dreadfort threatened to consume her. It took sixteen days to travel from the Barrowlands to where the Dreadfort lurked on the banks of the Weeping Water, and she had been having the same dream every night: a hulking man with hunched shoulders, pink blotchy skin, a small wormy mouth with meaty lips, long tenebrous hair, and cold pale eyes she assumed was Ramsay Snow gutting her favorite cousin with a bastard sword. Not a very subtle metaphor, and unequivocally a bad omen.

Wynne told Ellara to tell the chambermaid to have a bath drawn upon her return and left the guest towers in search of the lord’s chambers, escorted by one of her men-at-arms. Wandering around the Dreadfort unescorted was borrowing trouble, with interest. Wynne fidgeted with the gold signet ring on her right forefinger that had once belonged to her father while she waited in the hall until the chamberlain announced her presence and showed her into the solar.

Roose Bolton had shed his velvet doublet and boots; he sat behind a desk carved out of dark polished wood in his tunic, breeches and hose. Domeric had told her that his father preferred to work at night by candlelight and to wake up late, sometimes after noon. Roose Bolton did what he wanted, when he wanted. No one said a word against him because people who spoke out of turn in his hearing often developed a sudden case of tongues-cut-out-by-red-hot-pincers. “Out,” he said quietly and unfurled his fingers imperiously to shoo his chamberlain away.

Wynne curtsied to him as the wooden door whispered shut behind her, her skin taut with anxiety and anticipation. “My lord,” she addressed him properly but without preamble, “Domeric and I are going to ride up the Weeping Water on the morrow to meet Ramsay Snow.”

Roose Bolton scrutinized her with his grey caliginous eyes as she forced herself to stop fidgeting with her ring, and something like disappointment made one corner of his lips tilt into a sliver of a frown before he smoothed all traces of expression out of his face. When he looked at her, the light of the candle on his desk and from the flames in the hearth cast shadows over the angles of his cheekbones and the jut of his chin. It made his eyes shine like ice. “I forbade him from seeking the bastard out,” he said, “but my son doubtless thinks he knows better than his father.”

Wynne adjusted her eyeglasses with two fingers and resisted the anxious urge to clean the glass with her handkerchief in order to avoid looking the Lord of the Dreadfort in the eyes. “I am here to ask you not to punish him for his disobedience,” she implored.

Roose Bolton was looking at her like he wanted to flay her open, to strip all of her secrets away. “Shall I punish you instead?” he whispered.

Wynne had never before heard the word _punish_ uttered in such a way. It sounded dark, but more carnal than baleful. Wynne felt a flush of mortification creep up the back of her neck as her pulse spiked and unbidden heat flooded in between her thighs, making her bite her lip and squirm for want of friction beneath her skirts as her toes curled in the confines of her velvet slippers. It almost extinguished her fear. “For what?” she asked.

Roose Bolton dragged his pale gaze over the bitten curve of her lips, his face betraying no emotion as his eyes seemed to smolder. “For entering my chambers and speaking to me so boldly, my lady.”

Wynne clenched her jaw and bit the inside of her cheek to steel herself. _Lord Bolton has no feelings_, her mother had told her after Wynne asked her why the Leech Lord was in her bedchamber that night. _Those leeches that he loves so well sucked all of the passion out of him years ago. Lord Bolton does not love, he does not hate, and he does not grieve. Some men hunt, or hawk, or tumble dice. Lord Bolton plays with people. Our affair was nothing but a game to him, mildly diverting_. “Kindly don’t play your games with me, Lord Bolton,” she deadpanned. “I am in no mood for them.”

“You’re frightened,” Roose Bolton deduced. “Why?”

_Sometimes my dreams come true_, Wynne thought, _and I have seen a man who can only be Ramsay Snow gut Domeric in my dreams every night since I left Barrowton_. “Because you raped a lowborn miller’s wife beneath the tree where you hanged her husband for marrying her without your consent,” she answered, “and I think she and the bastard son that she bore of your blood and seed are going to hurt Domeric. Who does not deserve to suffer for what you’ve done.”

“I gave that woman the mill,” Roose Bolton informed her in a soft voice devoid of inflection, “and each year I send her some piglets and chickens and a bag of stars. Which is more than she deserves.”

_What she deserved was a liege who felt obligated to protect her_, Wynne thought, _not one who felt entitled to rape her because of a custom that was outlawed in Westeros two hundred nine-and-thirty years ago_.

Roose Bolton unrolled a piece of parchment and dipped his raven feather quill into a glass inkwell with a silver lid that shone in the candlelight. “You must think me a monster, my lady,” he murmured.

“I do not believe that being a monster is such a bad thing.” Wynne delicately moved across his solar to stand in front of his desk, her heart beating harder with every step toward him that she took. “One woman’s monster is oft another woman’s beloved,” she told him before she rang the bell and summoned his chamberlain. “Goodnight, my lord.”

* * *

Roose sprinkled a pinch of sand on the wet ink of his letter to Lady Barbrey and watched the ink dry before he sealed the letter with a blob of pink wax stamped with the sigil of the flayed man that glittered with bloodred dust made from crushed garnet. Wynne had been terrified of something, but curiously she did not seem to fear _him_ even though she knew about his indiscretion with the miller’s wife. Roose smiled to himself and stripped out of his tunic, breeches and hose before he crawled into his bed.

In the morning, he would send for his white leeches and bleed out the odd twist of emotion taking root in his gut. Roose had never felt guilt or remorse before, and he wasn’t about to start now.

_There will be plenty of time for playing games once she’s mine_, he thought, and smiled wider.

* * *

Domeric, Wynne, Skinner and Serjeant Beron rode upriver in the morning while the Lord of the Dreadfort slept. Wynne yawned into the hollow of her palm and held the reins with her other hand as she walked her sorrel for a mile before they came upon the mill. Skinner tied all of their horses to a blossoming apple tree while the serjeant went to fetch buckets of water from the river for their horses to guzzle. Wynne had worn boots instead of slippers and a gown of roughspun wool that made her itch uncomfortably even through her silk kirtle and satin chemise. Domeric wore a soft grey wool tunic, black riding breeches, and a pair of black leather boots.

Wynne fidgeted with her signet ring as she looked upon the mill. It was a gristmill built with a wheel that was powered by current of the Weeping Water. Shrubs that grew wild in the North dripped with ovoid red berries: hawthorn and holly and bindweed. There were cornfields planted in patches of land by the cottage that came with the mill, so the miller’s widow and her son ostensibly ground corn into meal and flour. Miners and their apprentices panned the riverbed for nuggets of gold in the distance while fishermen sat in their coracles; the Weeping Water yielded crayfish, trout, cod, paperbelly, torgoch, squaretail, greyling, steelhead and whitefish in summer and became one long ice fishery from its freshwater mouth to its brackish estuary in winter. Northern prawns, king crabs, bluefin tuna, flounder, salmon, haddock and halibut were fished off the coast of Bolton lands in the Shivering Sea.

Ramsay emerged from the cornfields with ominous rustling of the husks and smiled at Domeric with his meaty lips. “Brother,” he said. “Reek has told me everything about you.”

Wynne swallowed hard as she caught sight of the man-at-arms who came up behind the bastard and forced herself not to flinch at the foul stench that wafted from him, despite the flowers he wore in his strawlike hair. _Reek_, she thought, _the one who stole my aunt’s perfume and drank it all in a futile attempt to cure his affliction_.

Ramsay stared at her and his eyes gleamed in a menacing way that she did not like at all. “Who’s this?” he asked.

“My cousin,” Domeric said, “Lady Wynne Dustin, the heir to Barrowton.”

Ramsay kissed her hand. It felt nothing like the soft dry kiss his lord father had given her. Ramsay slobbered on her fingers and she had to wipe his spittle on her skirts as they walked up the path of dirt to the cottage, the sensation of his small wormy mouth on her skin turning her stomach.

There was no bastard sword in the cottage. Ramsay only had a scythe made for harvesting corn, but even a dull blade could still be used to gut someone. Wynne sat on a wooden stool with her back to a wall and watched the miller’s widow pour small beer into mugs. Mayhaps the bastard sword was aught but a metaphor, as things often were in her prophetic dreams.

Ramsay was asking Domeric about the history of House Bolton, the dynasty of Red Kings who often wore cloaks made out of the skins from the Starks they flayed alive. Domeric was telling him about King Royce Bolton, Fourth of His Name, known as Royce Redarm because he tortured his prisoners by tearing out their entrails with his bare hands. King Royce Bolton, Second of His Name, took Winterfell during one of the wars between House Bolton and House Stark and burned it down. Royce Redarm had done the same three centuries later.

Wynne stared at the bright red berries on the table in front of her. _Not hawthorn_, she thought as horrific comprehension dawned, _bindweed. Otherwise known as climbing nightshade_. While hawthorn berries were edible and hawthorn flowers and leaves had medicinal properties, bindweed was toxic. Its berries caused a fatal sickness of the bowels that killed people within half a day of ingestion. Wynne had read a book about indigenous plants of the North once, and it had contained a cautionary section detailing the plants that should never be eaten.

Ramsay meant to poison Domeric. It was a devious plan, since the effects of nightshade poisoning were delayed by digestion. Roose Bolton had no wife and no other living trueborn sons, and something had stopped him from throwing Ramsay down a well. Maybe the bastard had been raised by his mother to believe his father would legitimize him. Ramsay was also his firstborn. Maybe he felt entitled to everything Domeric had.

Wynne yawned and knocked the bowl of berries onto the dirt floor of the cottage with her elbow. Domeric turned and looked at her over his shoulder. Wynne feigned shock, her autumnal eyes gone wide. “Oh!” she gasped, “I am so dreadfully sorry. How clumsy of me.”

“It’s alright, m’lady,” the miller’s widow told her. “Reek can pick us more berries.”

Wynne scooped up the bowl and offered the berries that remained unsquashed and unscattered to her. “Eat them,” she ordered in her most peremptory tone, “partake of the poison you would have served me and my cousin.”

Ramsay snarled and backhanded her across the face. Wynne fell to the floor, phosphenes flaring behind her eyelids as she tasted blood in her mouth from her teeth snagging on the flesh of her cheek with the force of the blow. Ramsay seethed and grabbed his scythe as Domeric unsheathed his longsword and slew the malodorous creature Reek, spurts of rancid blood sputtering from the slash in his throat. Serjeant Beron and Skinner were standing guard outside, unaware of the monstrous threat skulking inside.

Wynne swallowed back a gobbet of spit and bile, salt and iron mingling on her tongue as her eyes went from hazel to eldritch white. Ramsay glowered at her until his pale grey eyes turned white for a fraction of a second and he wobbled on his feet before he collapsed into the vast abyss of unconsciousness.

“Skinchanger,” the miller’s widow hissed.

* * *

Wynne had a bruise on her jaw and dark smears of dirt on the skirts of her roughspun wool gown when she returned to the Dreadfort that afternoon with the miller’s widow and Ramsay in custody. Domeric was unscathed, although his tunic was splattered with blood. Ramsay was hogtied with his arms straining against the ropes behind his back. Reek was dead, slain by Domeric. Roose summoned his maester to the great hall and watched as Wynne sat at one of the long tables while Maester Uthor concocted an ointment of fresh ground herbs and honey for her and then applied the mixture to the contusion on her lovely face.

It had been decades since he set eyes on his bastard. When his mother had brought him to the Dreadfort as a babe he was a squalling, red-faced little monster. Now he was a thickset, blotchy-faced monster who had the gall to glare at his lord father with close-set pale grey eyes.

Roose should’ve thrown him down a well, but Ramsay was his own get and kinslayers were accursed in the eyes of the gods. _I shall have to order his execution_, he thought bitterly, _he attempted to poison my heir and struck a highborn lady. There will be no saving him from the consequences of his actions now. If Lady Barbrey finds out that my bastard so much as touched her precious trueborn daughter, she’ll demand his head on a spike and feed his bones to her hounds. Lady Wynne herself would be within her rights to_—

“Father!” Ramsay shrieked, “I demand a trial by combat! Let me fight my brother, and the old gods can decide who should be the heir to the Dreadfort!”

Roose sighed. Like chivalry and knighthood, trial by combat was a custom that originated with the Andals. It was perceived as southron and therefore uncommon in the North. Ramsay had a right to a trial, but the old gods cared not for the outcomes of a trial by combat. If the bastard hoped to slay Domeric in a duel, he would be sorely disappointed. “You stand accused of attempting to murder the heir to the Dreadfort,” he said in his softest, deadliest voice. “_My_ heir. You struck a highborn lady under mine own protection. I should have your hand flayed and your tongue out, bastard.”

“She’s no lady!” the miller’s widow screeched at him. Two decades of peasant life had made her ugly, turned her bitter; or perhaps he had made her so. “She’s a skinchanger, one who can seize the bodies of men, the worst abomination—”

Roose startled when the skull of the miller’s widow cracked with the force of a doloire flung across the hall. Wynne had unsheathed a small axe from somewhere under her skirts and thrown it with deadly accuracy. Roose watched her flip her long braid over her shoulder before her eyes turned white and he blacked out with her name on his lips.

Wynne bolted as soon as everyone in the keep was dead to the world; she grabbed her doloire, wrenched it from the forehead of the miller’s widow, slit her bastard son’s throat to save Roose Bolton the trouble of ordering his execution and invoking the wrath of the gods by kinslaying, wiped the brain matter and blood spatter from the blade, and took off for the guest tower where her clothes and purse were. It would be stupid to flee the Dreadfort without any coin or changes of clothes, and she had never been stupid. There were sixteen days between her and the Barrowlands, but she had family in the Hornwood that bordered the lands of House Bolton and cousins at White Harbor; and even the Umbers of Last Hearth might shelter her from the flayed men.

_Skinchanger_, the woman had called her, _abomination_. Wynne fastened her cloak and shook her head as she tucked her purse in one of the hidden pockets under her skirts. _Greenseer_, she thought, for that was how the three-eyed crow who came to her in her dreams and tried to convince her to travel far beyond the Wall had described her years ago.

Wynne had been fostered at Raventree Hall in the Riverlands as a girl of seven. Lady Agnes Dustin, her widowed grandmother and elder twin sister of Lord Tytos Blackwood, had brought her to the Isle of Faces in the middle of the Gods Eye where the order of the Green Men taught her to control her magic. It took her four years of tapping into weirwood trees and eating odd paste made of weirwood seeds and glutinous sap, but she had learned and she had grown more powerful than any human or inhuman greenseer before her. Wynne knew that such power would never be enough to keep her safe, however. Skinchangers were often hunted or hanged on sight in the Seven Kingdoms, especially the wargs that bonded with beasts like wolves or dogs. Precaution had been her armor for over a decade. Now that armor was gone. Lord Bolton knew, his men-at-arms knew, his servants knew. She could not be unseen. There was no undoing this, and so the only thing she could do was run and never look—

“Stop.”

Roose Bolton had come for her and she had nowhere else to run.

* * *

Most people thought skinchangers were a myth, but those who knew they were not hunted them for sport. Northmen had been hunting skinchangers down like dogs since the fabled Age of Heroes. Lord Donnor Karstark, elder brother of Arnolf Karstark and father of Lord Rickard Karstark, held annual warg hunts at the Karhold every year until he died. Most of them had been wildlings caught on the wrong side of the Wall, but not all of them. Some had been his people. It was a tradition upheld by Mors Umber, whose daughter had been stolen by a beastling from beyond the Wall and who had once skinned a snow bear that was bonded with a skinchanger to make himself a fur cloak. Walton Stark—the King of Winter known as the Moon King—had defeated the Warg King who once ruled Sea Dragon Point, killed the Children of the Forest who allied themselves with him, slaughtered him and all of his sons and beasts, torched his castle and took his daughters as prizes.

Wynne had been afraid of the men who offered their sons and grandsons and nephews to her as potential suitors, because she feared that people whose families had been killing skinchangers for centuries would hurt her for being what she was. It wasn’t an irrational fear. Roose had to admire her ruthless sense of self-preservation.

_Fear is what keeps people alive in this world of treachery and deceit_, he thought. It still annoyed Roose that she had run from him. _I’ll find her no matter where she goes_, he thought, _and I’ll make sure that she never again feels the need to run from me_.


	4. No Tales Were Ever Told {III}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 3: No Tales Were Ever Told {III}
> 
> Wynne is blindsided when Roose asks her to marry him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GRRM is vague w/r/t the distinction between skinchanging and shapechanging, but for the purposes of this fic:
> 
> **Skinchanging**: telepathically connecting with an animal or person and inhabiting their bodies, sharing their consciousness. Skinchangers are also called beastlings, and they are considered subhuman.
> 
> **Wargs**: beastlings capable of connecting with a dog or wolf specifically, the most feared kind of skinchangers.
> 
> **Shapechanging**: physically turning into an animal.
> 
> **Greensight**: the ability to have prophetic dreams known as green dreams.
> 
> **Greenseer**: people who possess the ability to skinchange, have prophetic dreams, communicate with animals, make plants grow, and see the world through a third metaphysical eye.
> 
> **Greenseeing**: the ability to see into the past and look anywhere in the present, typically by using a weirwood tree as a conduit.

**If I have a body that’s wholly my own**  
**then it isn’t mine. For a while I was**  
**protected by what I pretended to be.**

Stephanie Burt, “Hermit Crab”

* * *

**☙ ⅠⅤ ❧**

297 AC

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

Roose Bolton wrapped one hand around her neck and she grabbed his forearm as she felt the strength in his long fingers, his calluses from sword and dagger and bowstring rough on her skin as his palm curled over her throat. Wynne sucked in a sharp breath and waited for him to choke her, but he caressed the throb of her pulse with the callused pad of his thumb instead. Roose Bolton held her gaze and pushed her back against the stone wall, his other hand gently pinning her wrist. Ostensibly to stop her from attempting to attack him with her doloire, since that was her axe-wielding hand. Wynne tilted her head up and offered him more of her throat in submission as her heart fluttered like wingbeats. Ellara was unconscious in the adjoining bedchamber. Wynne had planned to wake her lady-in-waiting before she fled so her friend wouldn’t be tortured by Roose Bolton. Now that point was moot, and she was the one who had quite literally fallen into his clutches.

“You killed my son,” Roose Bolton said, his voice soft and menacing enough to send a shiver trembling down her spine.

Wynne swallowed hard. “I saved you from becoming a kinslayer,” she pointed out.

Roose Bolton stroked the side of her neck and the set of her stubborn jaw with his fingertips, careful to avoid the dried poultice of medicinal herbs and honey on her bruised face. “Was that wench your first kill, my lady?” he asked her.

Wynne huffed out a shard of broken, rueful laughter. “No, my lord,” she answered.

Roose Bolton exhaled with enough force to flare his nostrils and slanted his lips over hers with his hand splayed possessively over her throat, sucking on her upper lip to coax her into the kiss before he scraped the softness of her bottom lip with his teeth. Wynne had never experienced anything like the _need _prickling over her skin before. It made her blood run hot and thick in her veins, her pulse spiking until something clenched deep inside her as she whimpered and kissed him back. Wynne felt warm from the crown of her head all the way down to her toes as his thumb stroked from her cheekbone to her jaw and he intertwined the fingers of his other hand with hers. Roose Bolton devoured her slowly, his mouth dominant and adamant and thorough.

Wynne opened her mouth for him and felt his tongue flick the underside of her upper lip before he thrust deep inside, filling her up; it felt as though everything she ever was or would be had boiled down to his tongue in her mouth, tracing the edges of her teeth and tasting of her blood undercut by his uncharacteristic sweetness. Roose Bolton tore his mouth from hers with a groan after she began to suck on his tongue and rested his forehead against hers. Wynne nuzzled his nose with hers, shyly; she was out of her element, so a hint of shyness was inevitable.

“You have nothing to fear,” he murmured. “No harm will come to you at the hands of me or mine. I swear it.”

Wynne snorted as her heart constricted horribly in her chest. _This is only a game to him_, she thought, _he’s telling me what he thinks I want to hear. Nothing more_. “I’d rather you swore to stop keeping the first night,” she informed him.

Roose Bolton exhaled, his breath ghosting hot over her skin as his rough fingertips dug into her flesh with a gentle warning. “If you were my wife,” he whispered, his soft voice incongruously casual and calculated, “I would not dishonor you by taking my rights outside of the marriage bed.”

Wynne stifled the scoff that fumed in her chest like smoke from dying embers. It was such an uncharacteristically flagrant attempt at manipulation that she wondered if the passionate kiss he initiated had overwhelmed him as much as her, or if he only wanted her to think he was smitten by her. Wynne knew she was one of the most eligible women in the North, and he seemed to like the taste of power. Mayhaps he’d seduced her mother for want of another lordship, not solace as he’d claimed. “What do you want?” she asked him.

Roose Bolton held her face in his cupped palm and caressed her flushed cheek with his callused thumb. “You,” he said. “Barrowton has two dozen suitors. You have me. I will allow Lady Barbrey to keep her titles and rule Barrowton as long as she dowers you with a third of the income of the Barrowlands and names our firstborn child her heir, and you shall remain here as the Lady of the Dreadfort. You’ll be _mine_,” he told her softly and kissed her again. Hard.

Wynne swooned, but not because of his ruthless kiss or his proposal; she blacked out because her magic always took its toll.

* * *

Wynne, in her panic, had knocked out all her men-at-arms and Lady Ellara along with everyone in the Dreadfort. Roose woke the sleeping handmaiden, not ungently, and ordered her to tend to his future bride. Wynne had fallen unconscious before she answered his proposal, but he hoped that she would not refuse him. It had been so long since he had hoped for anything, _craved_ anything; burying two wives and four sons will do that to a man. Wynne had awoken something eager in him, something ardent that eclipsed his usual sangfroid.

_I’ve never heard tales of skinchangers powerful enough to seize the bodies of men_, he thought and rubbed his tongue against the roof of his mouth to savor the sweet lingering taste of her submission, _not even the greenseers of the Dawn Age could have performed such feats. Else the Children of the Forest might have won the war they waged against the First Men_.

Roose was confident that his people would tell no tales of her magical outburst, since they all knew the consequences for speaking out of turn; his father had cut out all his servants’ tongues as _his _father had done, but Roose had abolished the practice of preemptive silencing and his own servants were still ever so grateful for that. When he ordered a toe flayed or a tongue out, he made certain they believed they deserved to lose the appendage for displeasing him so the maiming would not sour their loyalty.

“Father.” Domeric stared down the hall from whence he came and pinched his lips together anxiously.

Roose knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if Ramsay had lived and Domeric had died today, House Bolton would have suffered for it; his people were staunchly loyal to him, but they loved his heir. Wynne had done more than stopping him from becoming a kinslayer: she protected his legacy. Roose owed her more than breaking one tradition, more than forsaking another lordship; he owed Wynne his future. “How long have you known what she is?” he asked.

“For many years,” Domeric answered reluctantly. “Do you remember when I went to visit the ruins of Queenscrown? Good Queen Alysanne is one of her childhood heroes. Wynne even named her first yearling after the dragon Silverwing. I promised her that we could go there and see the northern lights after I came of age.”

Roose wrinkled his nose in distaste. Alysanne Targaryen had been a shrewish queen who sought to reform laws she felt oppressed the women of the realm, especially lowborn women. Wynne knew he kept the first night and she had wanted to stop him from raping more peasant girls, although he had lost his taste for taking those rights after Ramsay was born; the illicit pleasure was fleeting, and hardly worth the repercussions. Those who paid their marriage fines had no cause to fear the invocation of the first night, and his smallfolk knew better than to cheat him out of his due. Roose had never been unfaithful to Bethany, though his reasons for that were more pragmatic than romantic: dishonoring his second wife meant slighting the Ryswells and by extension the Dustins, Manderlys and Hornwoods. Only a fool would have taken such a risk, and Roose was no fool. Domeric was sixteen when he rode north past the Last Hearth to the Gift. It had been the fifth year of the longest summer in history. Bethany had died six years before, and Wynne had not yet celebrated her thirteenth nameday.

“There was a pack of wildlings,” Domeric told him, “they killed her Silverwing and the men fought over who got to carry her off. Apparently wildlings think red hair is lucky, so they all wanted her even though she was only a girl of twelve. Their leader promised to let me live if she came willingly, but then he tried to rape her and stake his claim to stop them from squabbling over her. She didn’t scream, or cry. Wynne skinchanged and rendered them unconscious. She knocked me out too and when I awoke, the raiders were all dead and she was covered in their dried blood and her own tearstains. I am going to protect her always,” Domeric flattened his mouth into a thin resolute line before he proclaimed, “even if I have to protect her from you.”

Roose narrowed his eyes at his son and felt the absurd urge to reorder time and flay those wildlings himself. “Lady Wynne is mine to protect now,” he said quietly and irrevocably, “not yours. Do try to remember that.”

* * *

Wynne dreamed of the Others, of the Night King marching with his army of wights and white walkers atop their dead horses and giant ice spiders and of the goddess of darkness and cold who perished in the heart of winter thousands of years ago. She awoke with her eyelids heavy from sleep and rheum that had accumulated in the corners of her eyes and clumped in her eyelashes, the all too familiar taste of honey and water and herbs in her mouth. It was a concoction used by maesters to sustain the lives of unconscious people while they slept off sickness or recovered from injuries. She awoke to the same at the Last Hearth four years ago. “Domeric?” she rasped.

It was Ellara who pressed her eyeglasses into her hand. She could not see her lady-in-waiting without them, but they had grown up together and Wynne knew the distinctive sound of her footsteps. Ellara had been her friend and bedmaid for as long as she could remember, and she had remained a loyal friend in spite of the skinchanging and beastliness. Wynne clawed the rheum out of the corners of her eyes and put her eyeglasses back on. Someone had undressed her, for she was no longer wearing the abrasive wool gown that had been splattered with arterial spray or her silk kirtle over her satin chemise. Ellara, perhaps…or Roose Bolton. It made her blush to imagine him unlacing her. Then again, with her complexion, almost everything made her blush. It was a natural consequence of having red hair and fair skin that flushed pink at the slightest provocation. Ellara had ostensibly bathed her as well, since the skin of her face and arms and neck felt cool and clean. There was no blood on her hands or underneath her fingernails, and she was pleasantly surprised that she hadn’t awoken in chains. Or naked and strapped to a saltire. Historically, the Boltons had flayed skinchangers to see if wearing their skin would somehow imbue them with such power.

Wynne swallowed thickly, her throat dry in spite of the honey and water and herbs they must have poured into her mouth. “How long was I dead to the world?” she asked.

“Not long.” Ellara brought her a cup of lemonsweet that she forced herself to sip instead of gulping it ever so greedily. “You missed the evening meal, but the hour is not yet past midnight. Lord Bolton commanded that I send a servant to fetch him as soon as you regained consciousness.”

Wynne nodded and thanked her before she tentatively sipped more lemonsweet. Skinchanging into hundreds of people at once apparently made her head _ache_ like her brain was swollen, bruised. There was a more visible contusion branded on her jaw and it amplified the pain nesting inside her skull and in the hollows of her eyelids, the sharp twinges she felt at her temples and in her back teeth. _Ugh_, she thought, succinctly.

Roose Bolton arrived with a manservant carrying a silver tray of food, and she had to stifle a moan at the mouthwatering smell of the savory pie he set before her: onions and potatoes and cheese baked with cream and seasoned with pepper and salt. “Domeric says you cannot eat meat,” her lord of Bolton said.

Wynne sliced the crisp pie crust open to let some of the heat steam out in a hot puff of air. “Capon, goat, pigeon, beef, mutton, venison, rabbit, pork, ox, boar and even squirrel meat are wasted on me,” she informed him, “they all make me sick. I can eat seafood, however. Crab is my favorite, but I doubt you want to discuss my dietary preferences.”

Roose Bolton shrugged before he folded himself into a wooden chair that sat next to her bed and waved one hand to dismiss his manservant and Ellara, who quickly made herself scarce. “That depends,” he murmured. “If you intend to accept my proposal, your dietary preferences are _very_ relevant to my interests. I shall have to inform the cook.”

Wynne stared at him incredulously as she realized that Roose Bolton was _teasing _her. It made her giggle until she winced, her fingertips digging into her temples as if to staunch the flow of pain. Wynne gnashed her teeth and tried not to whimper as bright phosphenes bloomed in the darkness behind her eyelids.

“Migraine?” Roose Bolton asked her in his quiet deep voice.

Wynne nodded, a slow descent of her stubborn chin. “Magic always takes its toll,” she muttered, “the First Men called it geðsvíða. Mindburn, in the Old Tongue. My lady mother told everyone I was fostered at Raventree Hall, but I spent four years on the Isle of Faces eating weirwood seed paste and learning how to see through weirwood trees. I can look anywhere in the world, or any_when _into the past. One of the first things I did was go looking for my father. I watched Ser Arthur Dayne kill him and watched Lord Stark bury him in Dorne instead of bringing his bones _home_.” Words kept spilling out of her mouth, a deluge of secrets that had been screaming in silence for so long. “I tried to change the past and save him, but no greenseer has ever possessed that power. Not even the Children of the Forest, or Lord Bloodraven. Who’s still alive in a cave beyond the Wall, watching the world through his thousand eyes and one. I can see the future, too. Only those dreams are so metaphorical that I never understand them until the future I foresaw actually occurs. I dreamt of Ramsay using a bastard sword to gut Domeric, but I wouldn’t have known he planned to use poison if I hadn’t read that book on indigenous plants of the North as a girl.”

Roose Bolton listened to her babble with a faint smile on his face. “Do you always talk so fast, my lady?” he asked her, his mild tone more curious than annoyed.

Wynne spooned a bite of potato and onion and cheese pie into her mouth to shut herself up. “Apologies, my lord,” she mumbled after she chewed and swallowed, “I’ve been keeping quiet about my powers since I was old enough to understand what skinchanging was. It feels good to talk about them.”

Roose Bolton held her gaze and smiled wider. It made his eyes glitter from the flames that danced on the wicks of the pink and red wax candles lit in the niches along the stone wall behind him. “How old were you when you became a skinchanger?” he wanted to know.

Wynne gnawed on her bottom lip before she answered. “I’ve been a skinchanger all my life,” she informed him, “my oldest memories are of slipping my skin and inhabiting the body and mind of the stallion my father rode to war during Robert’s Rebellion. It started as horse dreams, but when I was three and learning to ride Silverwing I began skinchanging into birds. I wanted so desperately to fly. If you spend too much time with birds, you begin to think of nothing else. Cats do not like to share their minds. Dogs are happy to oblige. Fish always make me forget how to breathe air instead of water. Wolves are hard to inhabit, but they are fiercely loyal. I haven’t forged a bond with any creature in years, because it hurts when your bond creature dies. Humans are hardest. I never stay overlong in the skin of other people. If you do, you risk losing yourself in their memories and senses and thoughts. I had my first green dream ten years ago, when I foresaw my aunt Bethany’s death. I watched her burn alive, in the dream. I didn’t understand that flames were a metaphor for summer fever until after she died. It was so obvious, in hindsight. There was nothing I could have done to save her, but I was still angry with the gods for sending me visions of horrible things I didn’t have the power to change. At least I was able to save Domeric.”

Roose Bolton reached out and tucked a stray tendril of hair behind her ear, the rough pad of his thumb rubbing the shell of her ear in a calculated manner. “I should thank you, my lady,” he told her softly. “I owe you much and more.”

Wynne suppressed a shudder as something clenched deep inside her again. No one else had ever made her feel like this. Why couldn’t she feel something for someone her own age, for a man who had never shared her mother’s bed, for a man that wasn’t a raper or a flayer of men? It was so dreadfully unfair. Wynne knew what sort of monster he was and she wanted him desperately. _One woman’s monster is oft another woman’s beloved_, she thought ruefully. _Does that make me more of a monster than I was before?_

* * *

When he spoke, larger and louder men quieted to listen. Roose had also learned from experience that being quiet meant others would talk in order to fill the silence, and she was no exception; but he found that he grew evermore fond of her as she told him all her secrets. Wynne seemed to _trust_ him, and like a fool he wanted her to think of him as trustworthy even though he knew he was anything but. Roose had almost put fetters on her feet after she fell unconscious and shackled her to the bedpost to prevent her from attempting to run from him again. Only the thought that she might be able to inform her lady mother he was holding her captive by skinchanging into someone at Barrow Hall had kept him from doing so.

Roose watched her moan around spoonfuls of savory pie while she wore a satin chemise so thin he could almost see through it and he forced himself not to take the silver tray off her lap and put a hand between her legs to make her come under the pretense that an orgasm or two would cure her headache. Only her words stayed his eager hand. Wynne had _magic_, power the likes of which had been unheard of since before the Doom of Valyria. It made his skin prickle with excitement, like a child listening to heroic tales. House Bolton hadn’t gone to war against the Starks for centuries, but with her by his side he could become King in the North if he so chose. Or they could burn Winterfell to the ground, as his forebears had thousands of years ago.

Lady Dustin might approve of his marriage to her precious trueborn daughter if Roose presented her with the heads of Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn. Wynne, however, did not seem the sort of girl to nurse a grievance as her mother did; she mourned the loss of the father she never knew, but the Starks had not spurned her as Lord Rickard and his son Brandon had spurned Lady Barbrey.

Wynne muffled a yawn in the hollow of her palm and looked over her shoulder at him shyly, still feeling somewhat out of her element. “I do intend to accept your proposal,” she told him, “my lady mother has given me permission to choose my own husband. Although she may not tell you so when she responds to the letter you sent her asking for my hand, because she does have her pride and you never proposed to her even though you did share her bed. Which is a thing I am trying desperately not to dwell on.”

“I do not have the power to change the past any more than you do,” Roose pointed out. “Would it please you to know that my desire for any other woman pales in comparison to how much I want you?”

Wynne blushed prettily, but set her jaw and met his eyes unflinching. “No,” she retorted. “Because what happens after you have me where you want me? Or what if I displease you?”

Roose smoothed all emotion out of his expression and held her gaze. “When I have you,” he told her, “I will teach you how to please me and I will bring you so much pleasure that you shall never think to run from me again. I doubt very much that I will ever tire of you, since I seem to hang on your every word.” This he said with mild vexation, since he misliked the irrepressible effect that she unwittingly had on him. “If all I wanted from you was your maidenhead, I could have taken it after the feast last night. Were you wet for me, my lady? I think so, but I am nothing if not courteous. When I claim you, I will be your husband. If the gods will it, I shall be the only husband you’ll ever have.”


	5. The Pink Wedding {I}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 4: The Pink Wedding {I}
> 
> Three months later, the boreal nobility flock to the Dreadfort to attend the wedding of its lord and lady. Catelyn Stark learns a secret that her husband has kept for sixteen years. Wynne begins to play the game of thrones, but she’s playing to win something other than a crown or a kingdom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is a chronological amalgam of book and show canon, so the ages of the Starks circa 297 AC are:
> 
> Brandon: 20 when he died (260 AC-280 AC)  
Ned: 35 (b. 262 AC)  
Catelyn: 34 (b. 263 AC)  
Lyanna: 17 when she died (264 AC-281 AC)  
Benjen: 31 (b. 266 AC)  
Robb, Aly and Jon: 16 (b. 281 AC)  
Sansa: 11, on the cusp of turning 12 (b. 285 AC)  
Arya: 10 (b. 287 AC)  
Bran: 9 (b. 288 AC)  
Lyanna: 7 (b. 290 AC), a daughter the same age as book!Bran.  
Rickon: 5 (b. 292 AC)  
Lorra: 2 (b. 295 AC), a daughter the same age as book!Rickon.
> 
> I’ll take pretty much any opportunity to add more female characters. I REGRET NOTHING.

**I am a steel trap**  
**crowned with a magpie’s glint: not a girl to be saved,**  
**but a girl to be saved from.**

Natalie Wee, “The Theory of Magic”

* * *

**☙ Ⅴ ❧**

297 AC

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

Domeric had offered to give Wynne the grand tour of the Dreadfort, to show her their obsidian flows and the glass gardens and the caldera below the castle where his forebears and his brothers were buried. There were ore deposits of gold and silver circulating in veins underneath the crypts, where the metals were mined. Bethany was buried in the crypts beneath the Dreadfort with her sons, the ones who died still in the cradle: Broderick, Reece and Robar.

It was Roose who gave Wynne the grand tour instead of Domeric, since her mother had given her approval of their impending marriage and he was courting her almost like a proper lord. Roose left her gifts: an oval cabochon rainbow obsidian pendant set in white gold, with earrings to match, bolts of velvet and satin and silk and samite and changeant and Myrish lace, metallic thread and jeweled beads for embroidery, heirloom seeds to plant in one of the glass gardens, unfettered access to his library, and the use of the grindstone in the armory to sharpen her doloire. When she practiced throwing her small but sharp axe every day, he watched her with pure lust in his moonglow eyes; he took her hunting along the Weeping Water one afternoon and taught her to shoot a crossbow while he used a dragonbone longbow and arrows fletched with raven feathers. Roose didn’t kiss her again, and she was mortified by how disappointed she felt about that.

Lady Barbrey and her retinue of servants, vassals, and men-at-arms arrived at the Dreadfort two months after she received the letter from Roose asking for permission from the head of House Dustin to marry the heir to Barrowton. It was a cold summer morning with the smell of snow in the air. Ronnel Stout, one of the suitors Wynne had jilted, bore the quartered Dustin and Ryswell banner.

Cregard rode through the gates with his mother and the riders from the Rills and dismounted from his stallion only to scoop his youngest sister up into his arms; he was the spitting image of Brandon Stark, tall and heartbreakingly handsome with grey eyes and dark hair that fell past his broad shoulders. Roose stared at the Bastard of Barrowton with quiet malevolence until Wynne rolled her eyes at him and introduced her brother to her betrothed.

Lord Rodrik Ryswell was tall and lean, even though he was past sixty; his hair had gone to grey, and he wore bronze eyeglasses like his granddaughter. Their ironically abysmal eyesight had skipped a generation. Rostik, one of the distant Ryswell cousins, bore his golden horsehead banner. Roger, Rickard, and Roose, her quarrelsome uncles, rode in with a wheelhouse and their fosterlings Robert, Jonos, and Bryan Frey, who bore their distinctive black, grey, and brown horsehead banners. Lady Barbrey, Lady Wylma, Tyta, Walda, Alyx, and Raelyne had ridden in the wheelhouse. Tyr Frey, a boy of eight clad in the livery of House Dustin as befit a page, dismounted from his palfrey and handed each of the ladies out of the wheelhouse assiduously.

Cregard was of age with Domeric at twenty, while Raelyne was nineteen and heavy with their first child; she was all Ryswell in her looks, with thick dark brown hair and warm brown eyes. Wylma Ryswell, born Wylma Manderly, was a plump stout woman who wore a silver pendant shaped like a mermaid around her neck and kept her thinning brown hair pinned up in an elegant knot adorned by a caul. Tyta was seven-and-twenty and distant kin to Wynne through her late mother Lady Alyssa Blackwood, the fourth wife of Lord Walder Frey and younger sister of Lady Agnes Dustin and Lord Tytos Blackwood; she had the hazel eyes of House Blackwood and she was slender, with a sallow plain face and dull brown hair characteristic of House Frey. Fair Walda was of age with Wynne, the only daughter of Walton Frey and Lady Deana Hardyng; she inherited the sandy blonde hair, deep blue eyes, and slim figure of a Hardyng from her mother. Alyx was also of age with Wynne, the only daughter of Symond Frey, seventh son of Lord Walder, and Betharios of Braavos; she had the bright silver blonde hair of Old Valyria, almond-shaped eyes so dark they were almost black, and brown freckles scattered all over her pale brown skin. Robert and Jonos were the sons of Rhaegar Frey, a grandson of Lord Walder, and Lady Jeyne Beesbury, who died of a wasting sickness; Robert was eleven, while his brother Jonos was a boy of six and not quite old enough to serve as a page. Bryan was the second son of Walton Frey and Lady Deana, a squire younger than his sister Walda by two years.

Lady Barbrey went to hug Domeric, who hugged her back and kissed her cheek gallantly before his uncles crowded around him.

Wynne hugged her goodsister in spite of the belly and curtsied to the Lord of the Rills. “My Lord Grandfather,” she greeted him.

Lord Rodrik embraced her affectionately before the Ryswells all swarmed her. Wynne forced herself not to hide behind the much taller Domeric or Roose or Cregard in order to avoid her uncles and cousins. She loved them best from the exact distance between the Rills and Barrow Hall. Roose was the eye of the storm, a calm presence in the chaotic maelstrom of her family; his namesake tried to give him a hug and was cowed by the quirk of his eyebrow.

Wynne stifled a giggle at that and turned to face her mother.

“We must speak,” Lady Barbrey said bluntly, “alone. Now, sweetling.”

Wynne sighed internally. This was an inevitable conversation she dreaded. It was awkward enough agreeing to marry a man who had shared her mother’s bed and was older than her father had been without ever having to discuss that fact with her mother, who had the subtlety of a warhammer to the cranium.

Lady Barbrey sat opposite her in the solar of her guest chambers, dressed in her widow’s weeds with her head held high. “Roose Bolton?” she asked and arched one eyebrow skeptically. “We both know what Roose is, sweetling.”

Wynne blushed. It was true. Roose treated people as his playthings, his trifling amusements; he existed in a world of his own making, one where only he mattered. It was an imperfect reality, with one glaringly obvious flaw. Roose Bolton still had a heart—cold and dark, but still beating. Domeric mattered to him, her aunt had mattered to him, and their sons who died still in the cradle had mattered to him. Wynne had gotten under his skin enough that she mattered to him, too; so much so that he valued her opinion enough to ask her what she thought before he made seigniorial decisions that stemmed from her suggestions. “He knows what I am,” she confessed. “He promised to keep me safe. He meant it. I know what sort of man Roose Bolton is better than you do. However,” she adjusted her eyeglasses with two fingers and bit the inside of her cheek to steel herself before she proclaimed, “my lord of Bolton will never harm me because I am highborn and I am to be his wife. I will belong to him, and that means I’ll be his to protect. He never hurt my aunt, or you.”

Lady Barbrey shook her head. “No,” her lips twisted into a grimace, “but I was not his wife. Roose thinks of people as his playthings. If you marry him, you’ll never be safe with him because you won’t be safe _from_ him. Roose will play his games with you, and he will break you. No matter what promises he’s made. Men never keep their promises, sweetling. Do not trust in them or their word. Only trust in yourself.”

Wynne sighed externally._ Four years ago_, she thought, _I murdered sixteen wildling raiders. I read a book on human anatomy once, and that’s how I know which artery to cut when slitting a throat so a man bleeds out in seconds. Only that’s not what I did. I sang roots out of the earth to hold them down and made strategic cuts so they all bled out slowly, unable to move while I looked each of them in the eyes so they would understand why I was making them suffer. It was monstrous, but I feel no remorse. I felt powerful. Roose Bolton is a monster, and I’ve chosen him because I am a monster too_. “I will never be safe anywhere,” she murmured, “but I am not as breakable as you think I am.”

* * *

Catelyn Stark had been to the Dreadfort once before, when her lord husband had taken it upon himself to visit each of his bannermen in the aftermath of the rebellion that put Robert Baratheon on the Iron Throne. Lord Bolton had fought in the Battle of the Bells and at the Battle of the Trident seventeen years ago, and nine years later he helped suppress the Greyjoy Rebellion. Catelyn still found him disturbing, in spite of his loyalty.

Roose Bolton had shocked the other northern lords by marrying one of the most eligible ladies in their kingdom _and_ abnegating all of the lands and even the titles that should have come with her: Lord of Barrowton and Warden of the Saltspear. It was highly uncharacteristic of him to marry for what looked very much like true love, to untrained eyes. Their wedding had become the social event of the year, with representatives from almost every noble house of the North in attendance: the Dustins, the Stouts, the Ashwoods, the Mormonts, the Ryswells, the Manderlys, the Hornwoods, the Watermans, the Holts, the Lockes, the Cerwyns and Condons, the Umbers, the Karstarks, the Slates, the Whitehills, the Flints, the Tallharts, the Glovers, the Branches and Forresters and Boles and Mosses and Woods of the wolfswood, the Lakes and Longs of Long Lake, the Burleys and Harclays and Norreys and Wulls and Liddles and Knotts of the Northern Mountains, the reclusive crannogmen of the Neck.

Catelyn had overheard Lord Howland Reed swear to the bride by earth and water and bronze and iron and ice and fire to answer her call if she ever had need of him and his people. It was not the oath of fealty House Reed had sworn to House Stark thousands of years ago for all crannogmen, after the last Marsh King was slain by the King in the North: Rickard Stark, known as the Laughing Wolf, had annexed the Neck and married the daughter of the last Marsh King. Catelyn still thought it was strangely ominous.

When she visited Barrow Hall, she had met little Wynne Dustin and her bastard siblings Cregard and Melantha. Brandon’s get, a boy and a girl who both had the Stark look: long angular faces, brown hair, dark grey eyes. Lady Wynne favored her father as well, with her bright red-gold hair and hazel eyes. Catelyn had given Ned seven trueborn sons and daughters, but only Arya took after him. Arya, whom they left at home because her husband said there must always be a Stark in Winterfell and Catelyn had been reluctant to leave five-year-old Rickon and two-year-old Lorra.

Brandon was still a shadow cast between her and her husband. Ashara Dayne cast another shadow, even though Ned would not say her name. Catelyn _knew_ the beautiful Dornish lady had borne his bastard children. Jon Snow had the Stark look, but his twin sister Alysanne was born with pale violet eyes and silver-blonde hair. It hurt to see Cregard Snow in the great hall of the Dreadfort, because she felt as though she were seeing the ghost of Brandon Stark before he left Riverrun never to return. Mel Snow was sitting in between her brother and Lady Dacey Mormont, the eldest daughter of Lady Maege Mormont and heir to Bear Island. Catelyn remembered that Maege had fostered the girl, but Mel had stayed out of sight when the Starks had come to visit Mormont Keep. There were other she-bears in attendance: Maege herself and her daughters Lyra and Jorelle, affectionately called Jory.

Wynne had grown into a lovely maid of seventeen, with the sort of beauty that pricked like thorns and a frame made for childbearing. She would be wasted on the likes of Roose Bolton. Wynafryd and Wylla Manderly were sitting with her and her cousin Domeric Bolton, who did not seem cold like his lord father. Lord Wyman Manderly sat with his sister Lady Wylma Ryswell and Rodrik, her lord husband. Wyman had been wed to Lady Robyn Dustin, who died six years past. Ser Wylis, his eldest son and the heir to White Harbor, sat with his wife Leona Woolfield and unwed brother Ser Wendel. Robb sought out Benfred Tallhart and Daryn Hornwood, lordlings of age with him. Ser Rodrik, their master-at-arms, took charge of Rickon while a maidservant took charge of Lorra. Bran stared wistfully at the vaulted wooden rafters of the ceiling that had gone black from centuries of smoke and soot, as though he wanted to explore the shadows above. Sansa and Jeyne, the young daughter of their steward, waved to Wylla. Lyanna and Beth Cassel went to squeeze in next to Alys Karstark. They had not yet begun to feast, but still the long tables were brimming with noblemen and women nibbling on pieces of fruit and cheese fritters and slices of fresh white bread dotted with chopped nuts. Cupbearers poured water, lemonsweet, syllabub, ale, hippocras, mead and wine.

Roose Bolton stood and a hush swept through his torchlit hall. “Lord and Lady Stark,” he said in his soft voice. “Be welcome in my halls and at my table.”

Wynne rose elegantly to her feet and curtsied to her liege. Catelyn saw the way Robb looked at her, and so did Lord Bolton. When their son came of age a few moons ago, Catelyn suggested a match between Wynne and Robb because she knew the embittered Lady Dustin held a grudge against them for perceived slights and she had hoped that making her daughter the future Lady of Winterfell might heal those old wounds. Ned objected vehemently. “Lady Dustin believes I took her husband from her,” her somber husband had said. “I’ll not take her daughter too.”

“My husband and I would like to speak with you privily,” Catelyn said.

Wynne nodded. “Let us speak in the guest tower solar,” she offered. “If it please you, Lord Stark.”

Ned stood with his back straight, tension woven into his shoulders and twined in the bend of his spine. “My lady,” he said.

Wynne led them out of the great hall and down a narrow hallway with three men-at-arms following. Cayn, one of the guards they brought from Winterfell, and two men: one wearing the flayed man of the Dreadfort, the other bearing the crowned battle-axes of House Dustin. Wynne flicked her gaze to her men and they each took position outside her guest chambers, one on either side of the heavy door. Cayn opened the door for them and stayed outside facing the entrance to her tower room.

Catelyn had never seen organized chaos on such a grand scale until she walked into that room. Piles of books were stacked all over the floor amidst wooden trunks full of odds and ends: scrolls and manuscripts, rolls of blank parchment and paper, glass inkwells with silver lids, sticks and beads of wax, hooked ivory crocheting needles and skeins of yarn, bolts of expensive fabric, a sewing box filled with colorful thread and sprouting an orange pincushion shaped like a pumpkin, bottles of strange liquid, jewels and ribbons, sachets of seeds, and an assortment of axes. Catelyn sat at a small ornately carved oak table and smiled when Ned seated himself beside her.

Wynne flushed as she folded herself into a chair. “Forgive the mess,” she mumbled, “my lady mother brought my things from Barrow Hall. I’ve been collecting books ever since I was a child and I am particular about how my things are organized, and I wanted to sew my own wedding gown and I haven’t found the time—”

“Forgiven,” Catelyn said with another smile to put the girl at ease before she asked, “your mother did not wish for you to wear her wedding gown?”

Wynne bit her lip. “My mother and I are…” she flailed one hand obliquely before she articulated, “…shaped very differently. I know gowns can be altered, but I didn’t want to overwrite her memories of her wedding day. My mother wore a bridal cloak at her wedding that was a maiden’s cloak when my grandaunt wore it, and tonight it will be a maiden’s cloak once again. Since you mentioned her, we should have whatever conversation you wish to have before someone tells her that I am alone with the wolves. My mother has no love for you.”

Ned heaved an uncomfortable sigh. “Roose Bolton has been a loyal bannerman of House Stark,” he began. “However, since your father is not here to protect you, upon my honor I must ask if this match was something you chose.”

Wynne arched one eyebrow at him. “My father is not here to protect me because he went off to war for you,” she retorted, “you got him killed and left him to rot in Dorne. All I have of him is this,” she held up her right hand that bore her gold signet ring. “I had over two dozen suitors, but none of them wanted _me_. Those second and third and fourth sons wanted a lordship with a young cunt attached. My lord of Bolton, contrariwise, wanted me enough to forsake the lordship of the Barrowlands. There was no other choice,” she inhaled sharply through her nose before she murmured, “and do not speak to me of honor. If you were honorable, you would have told your lady wife that your bastard children are in truth your niece and nephew. Their name is not _Snow_, nor Stark, nor Sand. It should be Targaryen, since Prince Rhaegar and your sister were married by the High Septon himself. How convenient that everyone who might not have kept your secret died.”

Catelyn gaped at the girl before she turned and looked at her husband. “_What?_”

Wynne seemed to wilt as though her anger had been uprooted by speaking those words aloud. “This was not how I had intended to broach the subject,” she said, “but I won’t apologize. Don’t worry, though. I haven’t told anyone else. There are no little birds in the Dreadfort to overhear us, either.”

Ned looked stricken, and that expression told Catelyn it was true: Jon and Aly were not of his seed. “I _never_ wanted your father to die,” he asseverated, his voice gone thick with grief. “Not once. Willam and Brandon were friends, in spite of everything with your lady mother.”

“How?” Catelyn asked. “How can you know a secret my husband never told anyone, not even me?”

Wynne cocked her head and gnawed on her bottom lip before she answered. “I was fostered for four years in the Riverlands,” she informed them, “on the Isle of Faces. Where the Green Men taught me how to use my powers of greensight. I can look back into the past or look anywhere in the present. My lord father died at the foot of the Tower of Joy. I watched the Sword of the Morning slice his throat open, I watched Lord Howland Reed stick a dagger in _his_ back to save your life, and then I followed you inside and heard the promise you made to your sister. I’m a greenseer. I have a thousand eyes, a hundred skins, and wisdom as deep as the roots of ancient trees. Unfortunately, I do not possess the power to alter past events. I can only see, and retroactively listen.”

Catelyn had listened to the stories Old Nan had told her children: tales of the Children of the Forest and their green magic, of wargs and skinchangers who had the power over the beasts of the wood and birds of the trees and even the fish of the rivers and the sea. These greenseers could look through the eyes of weirwood trees and see the past, the future, the truth. Ned told Sansa they were only stories when she told him she was scared. Their eldest daughter loved southron tales of courtly love the best, while Arya loved stories about warrior princesses and queens, Lyanna loved the stories about the ancient Starks who ruled during the Age of Heroes as Kings of Winter, and Lorra always loved the sad ones that made her cry. Robb loved the stories of brave knights, Bran loved the scary ones best told in the dark, and Rickon loved tales about men turning into wolves. Catelyn had told her children stories of the ancient river kings and of the man the smallfolk called the last greenseer, the bastard sorcerer known as Lord Bloodraven. “Do you see the future?” she asked.

Wynne nodded reluctantly. “Yes,” she admitted, “I actually wanted to warn you about something. I’ve been dreaming of a white falcon being attacked by a mockingbird while choking on a silver trout. I believe the falcon represents Lord Jon Arryn, your sister is the trout, and Lord Petyr Baelish is the mockingbird.”

“Petyr?” Catelyn shook her head skeptically. “I love him as I love my own brother. What reason could he have to harm my sister’s husband?”

Wynne adjusted her eyeglasses with two fingers. “Aside from the fact that your sister gave her maidenhead to him because she hoped to marry him, but your father made her drink moon tea when he found out she was pregnant and wed her to Lord Arryn instead?” she shrugged. “There are whispers at court that Queen Cersei has cuckolded King Robert, whispers that are being investigated by Lord Arryn and Lord Stannis Baratheon. Lord Stannis has offered to foster young Robert Arryn on Dragonstone, but your sister is protective of her only son and she does not want to send him away.”

Catelyn still remembered how all the joy had gone out of her sister when her moon blood came after both their husbands went off to war. Lysa had been convinced they were each pregnant with a son. Catelyn had seven healthy children, while Lysa had miscarriages and stillbirths. It was no wonder she felt so protective of her sweet boy. Jon and Aly were not of her husband’s seed, but they were of his blood and they were only children. Princess Elia Martell had died in childbed during the year of the false spring. There had been whispers that Lyanna had gone away with the widowed prince willingly because she did not want to marry her betrothed, the man who started a war for her. Robert had been furious when Ned sent Prince Aegon to the Wall and Princess Rhaenys to Sunspear, he was pleased when thirteen-year-old Prince Daeron and seven-year-old Prince Jaehaerys were brutally murdered and their bodies were set before him wrapped in Lannister cloaks, and he had hired assassins to murder the exiled beggar Prince Viserys and Princess Daenerys; they were killed in Braavos half a year after the Greyjoy Rebellion, and the heads of the last Targaryens and Ser Willem Darry were brought to court and set before the king. Ned lied and told the world Jon and Aly were his because he was terrified his best friend would murder them for being dragonspawn.

Ned hunched in his chair, doubt weighing heavy on his shoulders. “Is it true?” he asked hoarsely. “Has the queen cuckolded the king?”

“Yes,” Wynne said matter-of-factly, “all of her children are bastards. Although the king has sixteen bastards himself, one of whom he sired on his favorite whore at the Peach in Stoney Sept during his rebellion even though he claimed he loved your sister and he thought Prince Rhaegar was raping her every day. Bella is her name, after the Battle of the Bells.”

Ned looked chagrined by that, which told Catelyn that he knew it to be true. Wynne had told the truth, even though it was ugly. Ned seemed to take her at her word, in spite of his distrust for the man she had chosen to marry. “Have you told Roose Bolton any of this?” he asked.

“No,” Wynne answered, “I do not believe that he needs to know anything yet. I want you to write Lord Stannis and tell him everything I’ve told you,” she added. “If you choose not to, you will go south one day and you’ll die in King’s Landing as your father and brother did. This is what I wanted to warn you about.”

Ned frowned. “Your mother has no love for me or my family,” he observed. “Why do you seek to prevent my death?”

“I started having green dreams when I was a girl,” Wynne informed him, “the future is always shrouded in metaphors and I was never able to interpret what my dreams were trying to tell me with enough accuracy to alter the outcomes I was seeing. Until I prevented my favorite cousin’s murder at the hands of his bastard half-brother. I used to think the prophetic dreams were a curse, but for the first time I saw them as a blessing. If they are a blessing from the gods, am I not obligated to share the knowledge I’ve gleaned from them with people who might be able to help me change and shape the future? I love my lady mother, Lord Stark, but I have no desire to become her. I’m also a Stark if you go back three generations, you know. Lady Alysanne Dustin, daughter of Lord Beron Stark and Lady Lorra Royce, was my great-grandmother. I am a Tully if you go three generations back, too. Lady Celia Tully married my great-grandfather Lord Brynden Blackwood after Jaehaerys the Clever broke his betrothal and married his sister Princess Shaera instead of her. Edmyn Tully, her elder brother, wed Lady Morgana Blackwood, mother of your father Lord Hoster Tully and your uncle Ser Brynden Tully. When her lord husband died, your grandmother returned to Raventree Hall.”

“My elder brother was fostered by your grandfather,” Ned said. “Lord Dustin named your father after his uncle. My great-grandfather, Lord Willam Stark.”

“Yes,” Wynne said and smiled back shyly, “the North remembers.”

Ned smiled tenuously at that. Catelyn fought the feeling that she did not belong in the North that lingered even after so many years of being the Lady of Winterfell. “Aye,” he said, “the North remembers.”


	6. The Pink Wedding {II}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 5: The Pink Wedding {II}
> 
> THE PINK WEDDING.

**Come forth, and bring with you a heart**  
**that watches and receives.**

William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”

* * *

**☙ ⅤⅠ ❧**

297 AC

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

It took his bride three hours to bathe and dress before their wedding. Roose hosted the guests in his great hall all afternoon and waited in his godswood at evenfall with the lords and ladies who came to witness the ceremony, with Domeric at his side.

Eddard Stark was officiating, fulfilling his duty as Warden of the North and liege of both House Bolton and House Dustin. Catelyn Tully, his southron wife, looked disapproving. Lord Eddard had never trusted Roose, which told him that his overlord was cleverer than he looked. Wynne had spoken with the Lord and Lady of Winterfell at midday about one of her prophetic dreams, one that had plagued her sleep every night for weeks. It spawned a furtive research project that she would not discuss with anyone, not even Domeric.

Maester Uthor informed him she had written to her granduncle Willifer, an archmaester at the Citadel known as the polemologist who specialized in the study of human conflict and warcraft; the contents of her letter remained a mystery to him, but he knew she had sat tangled among the roots of the heart tree greenseeing in his godswood for hours whilst his swiftest raven flew south to Oldtown.

Wynne had been his guest for three months, ever since her mother had begrudgingly approved of their betrothal. At first his people all feared her, the skinchanger who had enthralled the Lord of the Dreadfort. Wynne meticulously won them over with her acerbic wit and her perspicacity, hearing their petitions and surreptitiously using her greensight to solve the problems his people were too afraid to bring to his attention. Some of his people were still wary of her, but those peasants knew better than to disturb his peace.

In a few turns of the moon, she became the Lady of the Dreadfort in all but name. Roose was pleased by that, and quite pleased with her.

When she appeared, his mouth abruptly went dry and his heart caught in his throat. Roose smoothed all of the expression out of his face and watched her walk toward him on her mother’s arm, devouring her with his eyes. Wynne had sewn a gown of ivory silk embroidered with pearls of various sizes in delicate branching patterns like roots. It was lined with satin that shone pale silver, the modest sweetheart neckline trimmed with ornate ivory lace. Decorative satin ribbons laced through silver eyelets under her breasts to her waist and on her sleeves from her wrists to below her shoulders, more ornamental than designed for structural integrity; the skirts were a froth of silk and lace strategically pinned so the floor of the godswood would not stain the hems. It had elegant cuffed sleeves, a style he knew she preferred since all of her gowns had those as opposed to the long dagged sleeves that southron women seemed to favor. Wynne had worn the demantoid garnet cabochons set in white gold and strung with pearls that he had given her in her ears and at her throat, her magnificent red-gold hair was braided into an intricate bridal knot at the back of her head adorned with pearl hairpins; her ubiquitous gold signet ring that bore the sigil of House Dustin was on her right forefinger, but she had worn the matching garnet ring on the third finger of her other hand. Lady Barbrey had fastened a maiden’s cloak of pale golden velvet around her neck, the crowned and crossed battle-axes emblazoned in black and bronze on the back.

_Truly exquisite_, he thought as she met his eyes and smiled at him. All eyes lingered on the soft quirk of her lips, the pink flush that suffused her pale cheeks. Those men did not see the steel of her, the sharp tongue and even sharper mind.

“Who comes before the gods this night?” Lord Eddard asked.

Lady Barbrey wore her woolen widow’s weeds and her lips twisted into a brittle, bitter smile at the sight of Lord and Lady Stark. “Wynne of House Dustin comes here to be wed,” she answered. “A woman grown and flowered, trueborn and noble, she comes to beg the blessings of the gods. Who comes to claim her?”

Roose only had eyes for his bride as he spoke the words, anticipation bubbling up in the pit of his stomach; the light from the lanterns hanging in the branches of the trees that surrounded the weirwood cast a soft glow over her face that made her skin gleam like porcelain and set her autumnal eyes aflame with flecks of molten gold and green behind her bronze eyeglasses. “I do,” he said. “Roose of House Bolton, Lord of the Dreadfort and Warden of the Weeping Water. I claim her. Who gives her?”

Lady Barbrey turned her bitter, brittle smile into an implicit threat when she met his eyes. _Don’t hurt my daughter_, her eyes begged. _Please_. It was amusing, witnessing her desperation scream in the silence that stretched between them. “Barbrey of House Ryswell and House Dustin,” she answered, “her mother. Wynne, do you take this man?”

Wynne extricated herself from her mother and came willingly to stand before him. It sent an odd thrill of pleasure through him, knowing that she wanted this marriage as much as he did. “I take this man,” she vowed.

Roose offered his hand to her and she intertwined her fingers with his as they knelt before the heart tree, their heads bowed in token of submission. Wynne meticulously swept her golden maiden’s cloak underneath her knees with her other hand to avoid staining her skirts and stockings. Roose inhaled deeply through his nose as a quiet wisp of wind rustled the bloodred leaves above them, his gods whispering through the branches as he breathed in the night air scented with the green and growing smells of wet earth and decay. Northern wedding ceremonies had no septons and no priests. There were only vows unspoken, only nameless gods.

After they stood, he brought her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles before he untangled their fingers and deftly unfastened her maiden’s cloak. Lady Barbrey folded it with utmost care while Domeric unfolded a pink cloak spattered with bloodred garnets, the flayed man of House Bolton stitched on the back in red leather. Roose fastened his cloak at her throat and possessively cupped her face in his hands before he kissed her mouth, hard enough to make her gasp sweetly.

_Let them all think ours is a love match_, he thought. _If they all think me smitten with my little wife, those who consider themselves my enemies might attempt to attack me through her. I’d love to see them try_.

* * *

Roose caught her in the cage of his arms, scooping her up and carrying her into the great hall for their wedding feast. Wynne clutched at his shoulders for balance as her cheeks flushed and _burned_. Roose smiled and squeezed the flare of her right hip through her skirts, the proprietorial splay of his strong fingers concealed by the cloak he wrapped around her shoulders.

_I belong to him_, she thought, _and he knows it_.

Maybe that should have unnerved her, but she had chosen Roose Bolton. Wynne had known what it meant to accept his proposal, and she had gone into this marriage with her eyes wide open—all three of her eyes. Their hearts didn’t beat as one despite the song being sung as the first course was served, but she was _his_ and he was hers. No harm would come to her, not with the most fearsome man in the North as her protector.

_Roose Bolton will never love me_, she thought. _I doubt he’s capable of love, but he’ll protect me out of courtesy. I’ll never have to marry another man. When he dies, I can stay at the Dreadfort with Domeric or live at Barrow Hall and grow old in peace with my children. If the Others don’t bring on the night that never ends and kill us all before I have the chance to grow old_.

Wynne sipped her lemonsweet and tried not to moan as she delicately bit into a delicious piece of fried crabcake. Lord Wyman had brought a hundred wayns of crab and fish up from White Harbor, the first hundred of a thousand in the supply train he promised as his wedding gift to her. There were casks of hippocras from Highgarden for Roose amidst the seafood, too. Domeric had casks of fish and stout delivered to every village on Bolton land, so the peasants would feast along with the lords and ladies. Their lord thought it was a waste, but people loved Domeric and feared Roose for a reason.

“My lady,” Roose murmured after she finished eating her crabcake, “I have chosen to forgo the bedding ceremony.”

Wynne narrowed her eyes at him behind her eyeglasses. Although the idea of the bedding ceremony made her feel uncomfortable, she hadn’t broached the subject with him. Roose was fond of traditions, and she had been reticent to discuss the reasons she did not want other men stripping her naked or touching her at all.

“Domeric told me about Queenscrown,” her husband whispered.

Wynne turned and looked at him over her shoulder, impotent rage mingling with mortification in the depths of her stomach. “That was _not_ his story to tell,” she whispered back.

Roose held her gaze calmly, his pale grey eyes glittering like moonlight on steel. “Domeric loves you as a brother loves a sister,” he said, “but you are _my_ wife. I would rather hear all your stories from you.”

Wynne sighed. “There are some things a lady doesn’t talk about,” she informed him primly, as though she had not confronted him about the indiscretion that begot Ramsay a few moons ago.

“No other man shall ever touch you again without your consent,” Roose told her softly, malevolently. It was a promise and a threat, sharp as a flaying knife; the blood of her enemies being offered to her in perpetuity.

Wynne took his hand in both of hers and bit her bottom lip before she kissed his fingers in between his first and second knuckles, her thumbs caressing the creases of his callused palm. If a lord could kiss a lady’s hand, then it wasn’t improper for a lady to reciprocate. “Thank you,” she murmured to his hand, “my lord.”

* * *

Roose watched his wife dance with Domeric, with her brother, with her grandfather and uncles and cousins. Mel took her sister aside when she began to wince because her feet ached from too much twirling. Wynne laughed at something her sister told her, eyeglasses fogged up around the rims and pale cheeks flushed and glowing with sweat that she discreetly wiped away.

_I loved a maid as sweet as spring_, the bard crooned as his wife buried a yawn in her silk handkerchief, _with sunrise in her hair_.

Roose drained the dregs of hippocras in his goblet and stood. Greatjon Umber drunkenly began to bellow for a bedding, banging his fist on the wooden table in front of him as his sons echoed their father. Roose stopped and silence fell swiftly over the guests in his dread hall.

_I loved a maid as fair as summer_, the bard crooned, _with sunlight in her hair_.

“No,” Roose said in his softest, deadliest voice. When he smiled, the slice of teeth he showed was sharper than Valyrian steel. “I would not subject my sweet young bride to the wandering hands of men whom she chose not to marry. Nor would I have you question me in my own castle, Lord Umber.”

_I loved a maid as red as autumn_, the bard crooned, _with sunset in her hair_.

Wynne rose to her feet before the Greatjon could take offense and broke the silence with a hush of their own making, the rustle of her skirts and footsteps muffled by his cloak draped over her shoulders. All eyes fell upon her as she offered her hand to her husband. Roose took her hand and held it courteously aloft with his fingers curled beneath hers, the silver varnish on her nails shimmering in the tremulous torchlight. “My friends,” he said, “remain and enjoy the food and drink. I have a marriage to consummate.”

_I loved a maid as white as winter_, the bard crooned as they swept out of the great hall, _with moonglow in her hair_.

* * *

When she flowered, Wynne had been a girl of nine. Since the members of the order of the Green Men were all, well, _men_—albeit men who had originally been trees with antlers or horns on their anthropomorphic heads and skin like bark and vines or leaves or moss or lichen or mushrooms growing on their bodies in strange places—they had sent for Lady Barbrey. Then her mother had told her about how Brandon Stark had claimed her maidenhead with his “bloody sword” in excruciating detail and Salvia had taught her to make and brew contraceptive moon tea: tansy flowers, ground wormwood, mint leaves, a drop of pennyroyal and a spoonful of honey. After her lady mother spent the night with a man, she drank a tincture of wild carrot seed and honey to prevent conception.

_Irrelevant_, she thought as one of the Bolton men-at-arms guarding the hallway opened the door of her lord’s chambers for him and closed it behind them.

Roose dwelled in the heart of the Dreadfort; his solar contained a desk of dark polished wood, a chair with a red leather seat, a tall wardrobe and a black oak chest, and a canopy bed with a feather mattress and drapes of bloodred velvet. Blades hung on the walls, and three were swords made of Valyrian steel that she recognized: Orphan-Maker, the longsword of House Roxton castle-forged of steel that shone bright sable; Truth, the longsword of House Rogare that was lost during the spring of 135 AC; and Lamentation, the longsword of House Royce that was lost during the storming of the Dragonpit in 130 AC. House Bolton had its own ancestral sword: Red Queen, purportedly forged with the lifeblood of a thousand enemies and capable of drinking the blood that it shed. _Our Blades Are Sharp_, indeed.

Wynne had ignored his bed the night before she rode up the Weeping Water with Domeric, but now she bit her lip and stared at the sheets of fine pink silk and blankets of wolfskin and fleece and soft black velvet lined with fur. Most virginal women on their wedding night felt a sense of foreboding out of fear of the unknown, and seeing people having sex through weirwood trees was not the same thing as having sex herself. Wynne possessed a vast wealth of knowledge, and yet her nervousness stemmed from a dearth of personal experience that even such insight could not abate.

Roose caressed the nape of her neck with only the softest touch of his fingertips. It still made her arch her back, an irrevocable gasp snagging in her throat as desire slipped down her spine. “You have nothing to fear,” he whispered, “not from me.”

Wynne exhaled a shuddering breath and reached up behind her head to begin the arduous task of unpinning her hair without accidentally tearing any strands out by the roots. “My mother said it would hurt,” she whispered back as she plucked one pearl hairpin and untangled the soft tip of the braid that formed her bridal knot. When her hands were brimming, she walked over to his desk and dropped the hair ornaments in a pile of pearlescent baubles.

Roose came up behind her, his body almost enfolding her as his arms encircled her waist and he deftly unfastened the cloak he had wrapped around her. Wynne heard him fold it methodically and he left the cloak on top of the black oak chest before he came up behind her again. Roose sedulously began to unlace her gown and kirtle as she undid her braid, taking it slowly as though undressing his bride was something he wanted to luxuriate in; his breath was hot and heavy, the ghostly heat of him betraying how much he wanted her. “Every maiden suffers the same,” he said. “I cannot promise that it won’t hurt, but I can bring you pleasure before I claim your maidenhead.”

“How?” she asked him as she put her hands on the edge of his desk for balance and stepped out of her skirts.

Roose dragged her chemise up over her head and turned her around, pinning her between him and his desk in only her jewels and underthings: ivory lace garters with delicate silver buckles, satin and lace smallclothes tied with silk ribbons and sheer silk stockings trimmed with more lace. It seemed obscenely unfair that he was still dressed in his dark red velvet doublet, black velvet tunic, breeches and black leather boots; his doublet was embroidered with an ornate floral stripe pattern of vines and broad leaves split by a length of black leather cord laced through silver eyelets from his throat to his waist.

Wynne kept her hands on the edge of his desk as his gaze lingered on her body with such intensity that her skin prickled with gooseflesh before his callused hands cupped her face, partly because the ravenous look in his grey eyes made her weak in the knees and partly because she knew he would not let her cover herself. Modesty was ladylike, but it was also unnecessary. Roose had wed her and now he _owned_ her. She couldn’t hide from that. Roose took one of her hands by the wrist and brought her fingers to his lips. When his tongue flicked in between her middle and index fingers, heat bloomed and throbbed in between her legs. Roose kissed her palm and dragged his teeth over the inside of her wrist as his other hand smoothed up from her wrist to the nape of her neck.

Roose unclasped her necklace and took her earrings off before he kissed her mouth, his lips overwhelmingly soft against hers; he sucked on her bottom lip and bit gently, then he broke the kiss to nip her jaw. Wynne made a lewd noise she refused to classify as a mewl as his teeth scraped the base of her throat and he twisted the fingers of one hand adroitly into her hair at the nape of her neck while his other hand splayed over the base of her spine possessively. Roose nuzzled his nose up the side of her neck and nibbled a line of sharp kisses from where her pulse thrummed until his mouth was tantalizingly close to her ear and he whispered, “I can gorge myself on your sweet cunt until you beg and scream for me.”

Wynne didn’t know how to respond to that. Instead she hooked her arms loosely around his neck and _surrendered_. Roose made a low sound of approval in the back of his throat and untangled the fingers in her hair before he cupped her breasts in his palms and pinched her nipples in between his thumbs and forefingers, rubbing them until they puckered and flicking the hard nubs with his fingertips. It sent glints of pleasure skittering through her and she whimpered, hips squirming involuntarily. Roose squeezed her breasts and licked her nipples, sucking both hard pink tips into his mouth at once and biting them gently. Wynne bit her lip in a futile attempt to stifle a loud noise that she refused to categorize as a squeal as she clenched deep inside, as though her body was begging him to fill her up.

Roose stroked the flushed undersides of her breasts with his thumbs and smiled as her nipples glistened in the candlelight, slick from his lips and tongue. “You’re very sensitive,” he murmured, “and so responsive. Do you like it when I play with your pretty breasts, wife?”

“Yes,” Wynne said in a voice caught somewhere in between a mumble and a moan.

Roose seemed to have realized that _his_ voice did something visceral to her: the dark cadence made her so wet that she ached with tendrils of want that were twined and green and rooted deep inside her. Wynne felt mortified by her vulgar response. Until her lord husband lifted her onto his desk and untied the ribbons of her smallclothes, peeling them off without disturbing her stockings and garters.

“What,” she gasped as Roose brought the sopping wet scrap of satin and lace to his nose and sniffed decadently. It made him groan low in his throat, the sound muffled by the fabric.

Roose folded her smallclothes and began to unlace his doublet, his strong fingers loosening the crisscrossing black leather cord that held the garment together. Wynne bit her lip as she watched him undress; it was oddly intimate seeing him strip out of his lordly accoutrements. Roose folded his velvet doublet and tunic and piled her smallclothes on top of them before he removed his boots; his chest was pale and sprinkled with sparse black hair, his muscles lean and sinuous. Nothing had wrinkled or sagged with age, though his belly was a bit soft. Which made him seem human, not so monstrous.

“Do you bathe in blood?” she blurted out. Shiera Seastar bathed in blood to retain her youth and beauty. It had worked, since the sorceress was very much alive. Historically, the Boltons had possessed the power to absorb the magic in other people’s blood. Not unlike preternatural leeches. Roose himself was a dilettante bloodmage, so the question was almost rhetorical.

Roose chuckled. “That,” he murmured, “is a very awkward way of saying you find me attractive.”

“If you didn’t want awkward,” Wynne retorted, “you shouldn’t have married me.”

Roose smiled then, his expression fond. “Spread your legs for me,” he ordered softly. “I want to see how wet you are.”


	7. The Pink Wedding {III}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 6: The Pink Wedding {III}
> 
> Roose and Wynne consummate their marriage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **WARNING**: HERE THERE BE SMUT. This is pure filth, with a side of messy feelings. I regret nothing.
> 
> Whistling in the dark, larking, scarfing, and growl-biting are ye olde slang for cunnilingus. I’ve seen people in fandom and in fic use the “lord’s kiss” as Westerosi slang, but that was canonically a term coined by Ygritte in _ASoS_ so I don’t think it’s slang people in the Seven Kingdoms would use.

**Everyone needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside of someone else.**

Richard Siken, “Detail of the Woods”

* * *

**☙ ⅤⅠⅠ ❧**

297 AC

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

As she obeyed and spread her legs for him, she realized her husband hadn’t answered her question about the blood. Wynne didn’t get a chance to dwell on that because he knelt before her in one smooth movement and removed her slippers, his palms cradling each of her heels and his thumbs stroking her ankles through her stockings before he skimmed his hands up the backs of her legs to curl his rough fingers into the hollows behind her knees.

Roose was manipulating her with his calculated touches; he didn’t only desire her, he also wanted her to want _him_. Bringing her pleasure was part of his game. Wynne had seen enough with and without her third eye to deduce that. Getting what he wanted was something Roose had grown accustomed to. A chill slipped down her spine as she ruminated on how very out of her depth she truly was with him, for he had years upon years of experience with this sort of game and she had none. One wrong move would be her doom.

Alas, the ugly truth was that she wanted him whether he was playing with her or not. Wynne knew what sort of monster he was, and she had positioned him like a piece on a cyvasse board in between her and her enemies. It was far too late for second thoughts.

Roose kissed her inner thigh above the lace top of her stocking and bit the delicate skin, his teeth sinking into her soft flesh before he sucked at her to soothe the sting and nuzzled the crease of her thigh as every inch of her flesh tingled in response. “So very wet,” he whispered, his breath hot against her flushed skin as she whimpered and squirmed. Roose breathed in her scent, and that was all the warning he gave her before he dipped his head and licked up from the bottom of her slit to bury his nose in the coarse red curls at the crux of her thighs while the flat of his tongue lewdly spread her open.

Wynne squealed as his tongue swirled over her hole, teasing her dripping wet opening and curling her toes in the confines of her stockings; she clenched deep inside and he splayed both hands over her hips to hold her down, her breath snagging and shattering in her throat as his fingers dug possessively into her skin. Roose spread the slick plump folds of her cunt and sucked the hard nub at the apex of her thighs in between his lips, feasting on her innocence as though he were starving for it. Wynne screamed when he gently scraped that swollen throbbing nub with his teeth, her mind frayed and body flayed open by his mouth as she came undone; the soft caresses of his tongue in the aftermath flooded her with sensation from every direction, her lungs full and heavy from gasping, her head fuzzy and vague.

Until he nibbled on that same hard little nub, and made her come again with a slip of his tongue. Roose tore her pleasure from her ruthlessly, his forearms pinning her thighs apart as she trembled and writhed and thrilled. Sweat beaded on her forehead, trickled at the small of her back, and pooled in between her breasts; her pulse thrummed in her throat and blood rushed in her ears, blinding her for the first time since her third eye cracked her mind and heart open. It was bliss. There was no past and no future, only _my lord oh gods please more_.

“Say my name,” he ordered, his deep voice soft but insistent and ghosting hot over her. “I would have you call me by my name, Wynne.”

When she moaned his name, he was throbbing so hard it hurt. Roose almost took her then, but this was their wedding night. When he claimed her maidenhead, he wanted his little wife to be in his bed and he wanted to make her come all over his cock.

Roose unfastened her garters and peeled her stockings off before he rose to his feet, licking his lips and rubbing his tongue against the roof of his mouth because the lingering smell and taste of her arousal was more intoxicating than any wine. There was a plush Myrish rug on the floor in front of his desk, so his knees felt no worse for wear; his jaw ached from pleasuring her, but her lovely screams and squeals had been more than worth the effort. Roose untied his hose and stripped out of his breeches and braies before he scooped his wife up and carried her to bed. “When I visited Barrow Hall and saw you,” he murmured, “I thought you were a little beast.”

Wynne adjusted her eyeglasses as she wriggled back against the pillows sluggishly, arranging her ocherous hair to avoid trapping any tendrils underneath her exquisitely naked body. “I thought _you_ were unnerving,” she retorted, “creepy and cold as ice.”

Roose chuckled, the sound bubbling up from the depths of his chest. Neither of his previous two wives had made him feel like this, want pulsing hot in his veins with each beat of his hideous heart. Roose had no use for such feelings, but he was going to indulge them. Getting what he wanted only made him want more—a vicious circle.

When he was a boy, he was fostered at Driftwood Hall and Lord Stane had taught him to hunt. Roose wasn’t the biggest or the strongest or the fastest, but he had all the right instincts and excellent aim. He never rushed in foolishly. He stalked his prey for hours and learned how to spot the most vulnerable targets: the young, the sick, the elderly, the weak, the solitary. He lured them with bait until they ventured within range, and struck quickly and painlessly.

Roose had ignored those instincts when he raped the miller’s wife. He wanted her, and that had eclipsed everything else. He had been so young, so heedless of the consequences. He never made the same mistake again, because none of the peasants in his demense had dared to cheat him of the marriage fee that was his due after that. Roose had become quite a good hunter, and those instincts had branched out into other aspects of his life. He often knew intuitively what to do or say—and how and when to do or say it—in order to achieve his endgame.

Wynne had seemed perfectly vulnerable: young, lovely and lonely, in spite of her power. Roose knew feigning affection would make her more susceptible to him, but at some point in the last three months his affection became disturbingly genuine. Wynne had become something more than prey or a mere plaything, someone he adored. It was a privilege to possess her, to claim her as his own and bring her under his protection. Roose stared at her intently and reveled in the sight of her under him. Smooth pale flesh with rootlike striations of scar tissue branching out from where her chest had grown and where her hips curved. Soft curls that gleamed like polished brass in the candlelight. Shrewd autumnal eyes. Plump breasts voluptuous enough for a man to bury his face or his cock between them, prettily shaped and tipped with hard pink nipples. It pleased him that her skin was flushed with arousal, her eyeglasses steaming up around the rims as the heat of her breath mingled with his.

Roose crouched over her like a predator and positioned himself in between her thighs as if he belonged there, his cock twitching as she bit her lip and skimmed her hands up from his waist to his chest. Not pushing him away, shyly touching his skin and staking her claim in a manner that he found rather endearing. It excited him that he would be the first and only man to have Wynne. _I am hers_, he thought, _and she’s mine_.

“I have never been a warm man, I fear. So,” he wrapped one hand around the base of his cock and teased her opening by dragging the blunt head along her dripping slit and rubbing it against her swollen clit, “my wife must needs keep me warm.”

Roose held her gaze and felt the soft frill of her maidenhead caress the head of him. Wynne inhaled sharply through her nose and curled her dainty fingers around his at the base of his cock. Roose was shocked when she took his blunt tip inside her with a tentative undulation of her hips and tore her maidenhead herself. It made her wince and gasp terribly, the sound torn out of her throat.

This was no longer him taking her. It was _giving_, Wynne giving herself to him.

Roose gritted his teeth and exhaled with enough force to flare his nostrils. It took everything he had to force himself not to thrust all the way inside of her, to sheath his cock deep into the tight wet heat of her sweet cunt in one stroke; instead he claimed her painstakingly, the friction agonizing. Wynne hooked her legs around his waist and dug her fingernails into the skin where his chest and shoulders met when he bottomed out inside her, her silver nails stained with his blood as her virgin blood stained his cock. Roose hissed at the stinging bite of pain as she retracted her argentate claws with a mumbling apology. Wynne delicately kissed the wounds she inflicted, the gossamer heat of her lips and tongue on his skin mingling with the potent sensation of her cunt fluttering around him with the aftershocks of her orgasms from before.

This was nothing like sex with his first two wives. Neither of them ever made a sound in bed. It was duty for both of them, not something pleasurable. Roose had been oddly fond of them in his own way, but that fondness paled in comparison to how he felt about her. This marriage was something that he _wanted_, not something that he did because marrying a highborn lady and producing an heir was expected of him. Roose had never craved anything so much.

Roose captured her wrists and pinned her hands up above her head to stop her from drawing more blood. Wynne arched underneath him and his pubic bone ground against her throbbing clit, startling a shuddering moan out of her. Roose groaned as she clenched down around him, his mouth dry and his stomach crackling with pleasure; he kissed her, tasting his blood on her lips and flicking his tongue against the roof of her mouth to make her shiver. When she moaned breathlessly into his mouth, ravenous desire razed him from his head to his toes. Roose twisted his fingers into the soft curls at the nape of her neck and tugged, tilting her head and exposing her throat as his cock thickened inside her; he knew how to kiss, lick, suck, and bite without ever leaving a blemish or telltale bruise, but he desperately wanted to mark her as his.

“I’ll flay anyone who attempts to harm you,” he avowed, his mouth forming the words against the soft jut of her collarbone before he dragged his teeth over the hollow of her throat and took her sweetly. “No one will ever take you from me.”

It was almost too much: the weight of him pinning her down and holding her where he wanted her, the burning pressure of his thick cock stretching internal muscles that she’d only known she possessed in theory, the warmth of his hard lean body scorching her from the inside out. _I’ve skinchanged into hundreds of men_, Wynne thought, _but I’ve never had a man inside **me**. _It almost made her burst out laughing at the irony, but Roose did something with his hips that made her stop thinking altogether.

When he spilled his seed inside her, he tightened his grip on her wrists and made a soft guttural noise low in his throat; his brow furrowed, the muscles in his neck were taut, his chest heaved. Roose Bolton, Lord of the Dreadfort, her _husband_, had been undone by her. When he buried his face in the crook of her neck and whispered her name, his breath was hot and shredded on her skin.

It made her feel powerful, even though his seed trickling down the inside of her thigh felt awkward; his cock was still inside of her, but he was softening and strangely unobtrusive. Roose nuzzled her neck and loosened his grip, but he seemed uncharacteristically reluctant to disentangle himself from her. Instead he shifted onto his side and held her with her back against his chest, his breath ghosting over the nape of her neck as his arms wrapped around her waist and he fell asleep. Wynne took her eyeglasses off, meticulously wiped away the smudges on the glass with the corner of one pillowcase and extricated herself from her lord of Bolton to make water and clean up the mess he had made in between her legs. It was hard to walk all the way to the privy chamber since her thighs were trembling, her knees were still weak, her throat was tender where he had bitten and marked her and her cunt ached like a bruise.

Wynne had come to her marriage bed a maiden, but she had peripheral knowledge gleaned from greenseeing and she had read Lysene books on the subject of sex and her mother had imparted uncomfortably intimate details about her sexual experiences. Southron women learned from their septas that proper ladies should be dutiful rather than sexual, but the old gods did not see desire as sinful. Maege Mormont had five daughters and no husband, but none of her girls were considered bastards. Then again, the women of House Mormont openly claimed they could skinchange _and _shapechange into bears. Wynne had to respect that, even if their lack of discretion made her feel even more anxious than usual.

Dacey, the heir to Bear Island, had taken Mel as her paramour. Alysane, her younger sister, had a daughter of six and the she-bear was pregnant with another child. Dacey had confided that she planned to name her sister her heir, with her niece Arra as their successor.

Wynne had learned about what the ladies of House Mormont called growl-biting from Mel. Most people on the mainland called it larking or scarfing, if they spoke of a man using his mouth to pleasure a woman at all. “Whistling in the dark” was another term Wynne had overheard from the smallfolk in Barrowton.

It was not something that she had expected from Roose; the roughness was something that she had expected from the unnerving man who had more cruelty in one fingertip than an ordinary person had in their entire body, but she was appalled by how much she _liked_ that.

Wynne braided her hair lopsidedly over her shoulder and nestled back against his chest, naked but warm beneath the blankets and furs. _I am not safe anywhere_, she thought, _but I feel safe here. With him_.

* * *

Sansa had looked forward to the Bolton wedding for _weeks_. Arya could not ruin anything for her because she had stayed at Winterfell, her mother had permitted her to bring Jeyne along, and she was able to make herself a new gown of pretty blue silks. Sansa overheard Wynafryd Manderly tell her younger sister Wylla that Wynne had designed _and _sewn her own wedding gown. It was a beautiful confection of ivory silk, pearls, lace, satin, and lustrous embroidery. Wynne had cleverly pinned the hems of her skirts during the wedding ceremony in the godswood and unpinned them in order to feast and dance in the great hall. Now that it was morning, she wanted to compliment Lady Bolton on her wedding gown and maybe ask how she made the sleeves. Sansa preferred elegant bell sleeves to cuffs buttoned at the wrist, but she had liked the eyelets and laced ribbons.

Lord Bolton was so _old_, though. Sansa pitied the young bride, a maid only five years older than her, until she watched the Lord and Lady of the Dreadfort whisper to each other from her seat at the high table. Wynne had kissed his hand and _he_ had looked at her the way Sansa had always imagined the knights from her favorite stories looked at their ladies. Sansa had thought it was dreadfully romantic. Lord Bolton had even foregone the bedding ceremony because his wife had spurned many suitors and he wanted to protect her from their wroth.

Sansa and Jeyne had both danced with Domeric Bolton: a tall, handsome man with jet-black hair whose pale grey eyes shone like silver. Lady Bolton and Domeric had seemed close in the same manner as Arya and their half-brother Jon, and Sansa also wanted to ask if the heir to the Dreadfort was betrothed to anyone. While the Dreadfort was a bit creepy with the skeletal hands in the great hall and torture chambers beneath the castle where men were flayed alive in Old Nan’s stories, Domeric had been so gallant. Just thinking about him made her feel a strange fluttering inside.

As the firstborn daughter of the Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North and eldest granddaughter of the Lord of Riverrun and Lord Paramount of the Trident, Sansa knew she would someday marry a great lord or the eldest son and heir of a great lord. There had been offers for her hand arriving on the wings of ravens since the week after her nameday. Alas, her father was strangely reluctant to betroth her to anyone; her mother said it was because his sister had been unhappy with her betrothal to Robert Baratheon.

Sansa did not understand how Aunt Lyanna could be unhappy with the _king_, a man who had loved her so much he started a war for her and won.

* * *

Wynne opened her eyes as Roose nuzzled the back of her neck in his sleep. After he claimed her maidenhead, he woke during the hour of the nightingale and took her again. Roose fucked her on his knees with her on her back, a pillow beneath her and his hands on her hips to hold her where he wanted her with her legs up over his shoulders; he watched his cock split her open and stroked her clit in rough circles with the callused pad of his thumb while she did as she was told and played with her own nipples.

Roose ordered her to beg for him and she knew instinctively that he was training her to respond to him in a specific way during sex, but it felt so good to submit that she did not care.

Wynne had always been cerebral, and perfecting her greensight had only honed that aspect of her personality. Most of her time was spent in what she called the greenscape—the metaphysical space through a weirwood tree where time and space were malleable and everything was visible if you know how to see—overthinking and using context retroactively gleaned from the past to interpret her metaphoric dreams of the future or reading books with her third eye whilst her flesh and blood eyes and hands were occupied with sewing or embroidery or knitting. Wynne had never let herself be consumed by the greenscape as Bloodraven had, rooted in the ancient weirwood beyond the Wall and unable to physically leave whilst he watched the world through his thousand eyes and one; but she was bigger than her body and she had slipped out of her skin too often to feel comfortable inside.

It was a mental form of flaying, but flaying nonetheless. Boltons wore the skin of their enemies. Wynne skinchanged into her enemies or shed her skin in order to see what and where and when that only she could see.

When he grabbed her by the throat and kissed her for the first time, her lord of Bolton had made her feel as though she truly belonged in her own body. Roose made her feel human. Unequivocally. Overwhelmingly. Irrevocably. Wynne didn’t know how she felt about that.

Dawn had crept in through narrow windows as the morning sun rose, casting bright slivers of sunshine that felt like daggers stabbing her in the face. Wynne made a most unladylike, inarticulate noise that sounded like _nghhh_ and squinted at the blur of the bedside table upon which her eyeglasses were folded.

When she wriggled and reached for them, the pangs between her thighs made her wince and hiss in pain. Roose stirred with his arms tangled around her waist. “You’re sore,” he whispered as she put her eyeglasses back on.

“You were rough with me,” Wynne retorted matter-of-factly. There was nothing accusatory in her voice, only unvarnished truth.

Roose snorted and kissed the curve of her neck softly. “You enjoyed it,” he whispered back, his quiet deep voice dripping with smugness only men who had recently gotten laid seemed to possess.

“Yes,” Wynne admitted with a surreptitious eyeroll, “and now I’m sore. Actions have consequences, my dread lord. I can feel you inside me still.”

Roose growled low in his throat and rubbed his cock up against her ass. If she wasn’t capable of rendering him unconscious with aught but a thought, it might have felt like a threat. Roose was thick and hard, and the sensation of him rutting slowly against her made her cunt throb with echoes of desire even though she ached too much for more fucking. “If your aim was to kill my desire for you, sweet girl,” he said, “telling me that was not the best way to do so.”

_My aim_, Wynne thought, _was to entice a monster into protecting me instead of harming me. A dangerous game, but I’m winning_. “I’m sore,” she murmured. “My mouth is not.”


	8. The Pink Wedding {IV}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 7: The Pink Wedding {IV}
> 
> After he teaches her to suck his cock, Wynne and Roose take a bath together and discuss the future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **WARNING**: HERE THERE BE SMUT.
> 
> Vitruvius—a Roman author, architect, and engineer born in between 80 BCE and 70 BCE—discovered lead poisoning decades before the establishment of the Roman Empire, when Roman civilization was still a republic. Ergo, it’s not anachronistic for maesters in the pseudo-medieval world of _ASoIaF_ to know that lead is hazardous to your health.
> 
> Appertisation was invented by French confectioner and brewer Nicolas Appert in 1809, but it’s not anachronistic either because I do what I want.

**I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,**  
**like what I remember of love when I was young—**  
**love that was so often foolish in its objectives**  
**but never in its choices, its intensities**  
**too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised.**

**My soul has been so fearful, so violent;**  
**forgive its brutality.**  
**As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,**  
**not wishing to give offense**  
**but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance.**

Louise Glück, “Crossroads”

* * *

**☙ ⅤⅠⅠⅠ ❧**

297 AC

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

Roose narrowed his pale eyes at her incredulously. It was most improper of her to suggest doing such a thing, something that highborn girls would never do because seed could not quicken if spilled down their soft throats. _What vulgar sort of game is she playing with me? _he thought, intrigued. “You would suck my cock like a common whore?” he asked her.

Wynne turned and looked at him over her shoulder, resplendent curls tumbling down her back where they had slithered out of her braid. “You used your mouth to pleasure me last night,” she pointed out. “Does wanting to reciprocate make me a whore, my lord?”

Roose remained quiet as she arched her eyebrows at him in unspoken impugn even as her pale cheeks and neck flushed dark pink with embarrassment. Then it occurred to him that his exquisite new wife had offered him a suckjob, and he was quibbling when he could be fucking her pretty mouth. Roose smoothly rose and kissed the soft curve of her shoulder, breathing in the lingering scent of their sex on her skin and tugging at the ribbon tied around the culmination of her braid to undo it.

“I think not,” he murmured. “Get on your knees.”

Roose had been inside of her twice on their first night, but she had not had an opportunity to actually look at his cock. Wynne had seen naked men in the greenscape and she had looked at the drawings in her anatomy book of the penis both erect and flaccid, but seeing one in the flesh was a totally new experience. Roose was pale all over, the shaft of his thick cock as pallid as his chest; the head tinted pink and peeking out of his foreskin, the base nestled in a sparse patch of coarse black hair. It twitched under her scrutiny, the veins on the underside vined underneath the smoothness of his skin.

_Men cannot be trusted_, her lady mother had told her over and over. _Men seldom keep their promises. Men cannot protect you. Their love won’t keep you safe. Only power can_.

Lady Barbrey had meant the sort of power that came from wealth, in the form of either coin or land or both. Wynne possessed another kind of power, and she had polished many other skills. Alas, sucking cock wasn’t one of them.

“You’re staring,” Roose observed mildly, his quiet deep voice amused.

Wynne adjusted her eyeglasses and tilted her head to look at his face as obscene anticipation twisted up through her stomach; the sight of him standing over her imperiously while he gazed down at her as though he _owned _her made her embarrassingly wet. It was her choice to belong to him, and that knowledge made her feel powerful even though she was utterly at his mercy.

Roose fisted one hand in her hair and wrapped the other around the base of his cock, stroking himself slowly. “When you’re on your knees for me,” he told her, “you will have your mouth open. Do you want to suck my cock, Wynne?”

Wynne bit her lip before she opened her mouth obediently and licked her bottom lip, more out of nervousness than with the intention of seduction. “Yes,” she answered breathlessly. “I would love to suck your cock, my lord.”

“Very good.” Roose smirked at her response and held the head of his cock perilously close to her lips, but did not touch her. “Do you like it when I give you orders, my lady?” he asked.

Wynne inhaled deeply through her nose, breathing in the smell of his sweat and their sex from the night before and mortified by the way her mouth had begun to water; he didn’t smell of her maiden’s blood, so ostensibly he got up out of bed at some point during the unholy hours of the morning and cleaned his cock. “Yes,” she answered, her brow furrowed as she attempted to articulate. “I overthink everything, my lord. It’s bliss to stop thinking and feel.” _You make me feel human_, she thought, but didn’t say.

Roose frowned at her in abject confusion, because he did everything in his power to suppress his emotions and he emphatically did not understand why unadulterated feeling untainted by overthought was blissful for her. Then he smoothed away his expression of bewilderment and tapped his cock gently against her bottom lip. Hot precum dripped from the slit on his blunt tip onto her lip and into her mouth, shiny and salty. “Lick me with the flat of your tongue,” he ordered, “curl it around the head and peel my foreskin back.”

Wynne inadvertently moaned at the taste of him on her tongue, the sound resonant against the head of his cock. Roose growled in response as she peeled his foreskin back and he slipped into her mouth, rubbing the blunt tip against her soft palate. Wynne swirled her tongue delicately around the head and caught another drop of precum; his nostrils flared and he gnashed his teeth around a guttural noise. Then he started to feed the rest of his cock to her, slowly thrusting inside her mouth and rubbing himself against the back of her throat. Wynne inhaled deeply through her nose and trembled as the sound of his pleasure sent tinging heat and paradoxical shivers of cold skittering over her skin.

“Take it all, sweet girl,” Roose told her. “Relax your throat for me. Take me deeper and _suck_.”

Wynne sucked on him as saliva began to pool in her mouth, looking up into his pale grey eyes as she swallowed around his girth in a futile attempt to stop herself from drooling. It wasn’t ladylike to drool on expensive Myrish carpets, although letting her husband stuff her mouth full of his cock and fuck her face wasn’t very ladylike either. Wynne lifted one hand to wipe the saliva away, but he shook his head.

“No,” Roose murmured and tightened his grip on her hair, “put your hands behind your back.”

Wynne moaned lewdly around him as drool trickled in a thin strand down her chin and put her hands behind her back. It dripped onto her chest and slid between her breasts. Roose thrust a little farther into her mouth and fucked her throat roughly, until her eyeglasses fogged up around the rims and she was softly gagging around him as she swallowed more of his precum; the sharp heady scent of him filled her nostrils and made her moan again, her head light and dizzy.

“Such a good little wife,” he extolled, his quiet deep voice hoarse. “So eager to please. Such a good little _cocksucker_.”

Wynne made a noise she refused to classify as a whimper and sucked even harder. It was strange, but pleasure seemed to loosen his tongue; Roose wasn’t a taciturn man, but he never talked out of turn. Wynne held his gaze until his moonglow eyes fluttered closed and he clenched his teeth, the muscles in his neck gone taut as he grunted and spilled his seed in her mouth. After he caught his breath, Roose slipped his softening cock out from in between her swollen lips and loosened his grip on her hair as she looked up at him. Wynne had swallowed because the alternative was choking on his cum and she was certain that a good little wife—a good little _cocksucker_—should not choke, despite the slightly bitter taste.

“You’re mine, Wynne,” Roose said with soft vehemence. “Do you understand that?”

Wynne bit her lip as she rose to her feet and he kissed her forehead with calculated tenderness; his palm cupped her face and he affectionately caressed her cheek with the callused pad of his thumb. “Yes,” she told him, because it was precisely what he wanted to hear and because it was true. “I am yours, Roose.”

Roose smiled faintly. “Very good,” he murmured and stroked the back of her neck idly with his fingertips as though he was still reluctant to disentangle himself from her. “Clean your teeth. I’ll have my chambermaids draw us a bath.”

* * *

Wynne discreetly wiped the errant trickles of drool that had dried in between her breasts and put her chemise back on. Then she rubbed her teeth with powder made of sage and spikenard and salt before she rinsed her mouth out with gargles of water that she poured from a silver pitcher into a cup that one of the servants must have left on the bedside table and spat daintily in the chamber pot whilst her husband spoke quietly to his chamberlain. Roose was naked as his nameday, but he often met with the men who ran his household while he was abed being leeched so nudity didn’t seem to bother him.

After she drank more water, her throat felt much less tender from being thoroughly fucked. Wynne muffled a yawn in the hollow of her palm and caught sight of the gown and kirtle hanging from his wardrobe: pale blush pink satin and dark red silk trimmed and paneled with black lace and embroidered with garnet drops, the colors of House Bolton in shades that would not clash with her ocherous hair. _Ellara_, she thought with a grin as she found the basket holding the oaken door of his wardrobe open. It contained her soap and oils and tonic, white goop concocted by Salvia to keep her hair and skin healthy and soft; her mother had promised to send her fresh batches from Barrowton along with the incomes Roose had asked for as her dowry.

It still felt a bit peculiar to Wynne that she and her husband would not rule as the Lord and Lady of Barrowton, as every Dustin had before her since the Thousand Years War ended with the last Barrow King bending the knee to the King in the North and sealing the alliance with a marriage between King Eyron Stark and Princess Helewys Dustin. When she negotiated the finer points of her betrothal contract with Roose, he agreed their firstborn would inherit the sigil and words of House Dustin, but he was adamant that all of their children would bear his name. It didn’t seem to matter that she was the last of her House, or that her father’s name would die with her.

Wynne sighed. _I married a cold man_, she thought. _In other news, flowers bloom in spring, leaves are green in summer, harvests are reaped in autumn, and as the Starks are fond of saying: winter is coming_.

* * *

After his father died of winter fever, he became the Lord of the Dreadfort. Roose didn’t mourn his father overmuch, since the man had backhanded his mother so hard she toppled down the stairs when he was a boy of fourteen; whenever he thought about that day, he could still hear the cracking sound her skull made drowning out every other noise in the world and feel her blood hot on his face again. After that, he began his frequent leechings.

_My blood is bad_, he thought every time he felt a curdle of rage. There was so much anger in him, in his veins, and that simply would not do. _My father’s blood_.

Ramsay had been his own get beyond all doubt. Domeric was more Bethany’s son than his, thus far untainted by violence—his first instinct was always to protect, never to destroy. Roose had only ever felt protective of seven people: his mother, his elder sisters, Romilda, Bethany, Domeric, and his new little wife.

Wynne only responded with violence when she felt threatened or when someone that she loved was imperiled: the wildling raiders at Queenscrown, the miller’s widow, and Ramsay all had one thing in common. They put her and his son in danger, and she had slain them all with utmost efficiency. Roose had never seen her wroth; he hoped that he never would. It suited his purposes far better to make her happy, not angry. Wynne attempted to stifle a yawn and did not quite succeed, instead disgorging a quiet somnolent noise.

_Such a sweet girl_, Roose thought and went to clean his teeth as his chamberlain left the room to fetch the chambermaids and fill his bathtub, _she’s the most precious thing I own._ _It’s almost a shame that she’s married to a man such as myself. I would pity the suitors she spurned, but their loss is unequivocally my gain_.

There was a door of polished black oak in one corner of his chambers. Roose opened the door and led her into a room containing a huge bathtub carved out of smooth pink granite, the rosy slabs of igneous rock speckled with glitters of black and white. Wynne gasped as steaming hot water poured into the bathtub from a curved piece of copper pipe jutting out of the stone wall.

Domeric had told her that all of the lead plumbing in the Dreadfort had been replaced with antimony, tin, copper and bronze ten years ago, after Maester Uthor received a raven from Archmaester Ebrose informing him that ingesting lead caused stillbirths and increased the risk of infant mortality. It was a message every maester in the realm had received. Brandon the Builder had used cast iron plumbing to pipe the water from the underground hot springs into the walls of Winterfell and Barrowton had wooden pipe sealed with animal fat that was later replaced with copper and bronze.

Wynne strategically positioned her basket of soap and oils by the decadent tub before she awkwardly stripped out of her chemise and left it puddled on the floor outside the door so the chambermaids would know it needed washing. Ellara had left her a fresh shift along with the gown. Roose was unabashedly watching her when she turned back around with her arms folded beneath her breasts to stop them from wobbling as she moved, his pale grey eyes smoldering.

This prompted her to arch her eyebrows at him in warning as she climbed into the bathtub and sank luxuriously into the water; all of her soreness began to melt soothingly away while she inhaled the steam and muffled a soft moan that had begun to waft up out of her throat. Wynne took her eyeglasses off and put them on the edge of the granite tub before she unceremoniously dunked her head underwater, soaking the roots of her hair. Then she poured the primrose oil into her palm and began to wash her hair meticulously.

Wynne couldn’t see much of anything with her eyeglasses off and her third eye closed, but she was overwhelmingly aware of him watching her as she rinsed her hair and piled it up on top of her head as she coated it with the goop; she moved to sit on the edge of the bathtub, plucked her soap and soft sea sponge out of the basket, and began to scrub the skin of her arms. Roose climbed into the bathtub with her but sat at the other end, making her feel strangely bereft. Which, knowing him, might have been what he intended.

“I’ve had your things moved into the lady’s chambers,” he said. “Those are your rooms to use as you see fit. However, I would have you spend your nights with me. I intend to claim my rights frequently, if you’re willing.”

Wynne suppressed an unladylike snort as she hunched over to scrub the bottoms of her feet and in between her toes. It didn’t matter if she consented now that he owned her, but he was being courteous and respectful even though she knew he could be cruel and merciless. Wynne had to appreciate that. _This is a marriage of convenience_, she thought, _we both get what we want. I have the Lord of the Dreadfort to protect me, and he gets to fuck me whenever and wherever he likes. It’s a game that we’re both winning, because thus far I actually like getting fucked by Roose, gods help me_. “I am,” she told him before she turned her back on him, “could you…?”

Roose hummed his assent low in his throat and moved to stand behind her, the bathwater undulating around him. Sometimes it was very obvious that he’d been married twice before, since he seemed to understand the minutiae of women: the preparation required to dress impeccably, the effort that went into caring for hair and skin in a kingdom where the cold northern wind chafed even at the heart of summer, the perfunctory way he had waited until she undid her intricate bridal knot and removed all of her jewelry before he kissed her. Roose smoothed the soap gently over her back and scrubbed from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine, swirling the sponge in circles as puffs of steam rose around them; his warm breath slinked over her neck and down her spine, hot enough to make her gasp and shudder. “I’ve had inquiries from my vassals about positions in our household for their daughters,” he said and skimmed his callused fingertips over the blemishes on the delicate skin of her neck. “I know that Lady Stout is a dear friend of yours, but you should have more than one lady-in-waiting. It’s only proper, in accordance with your new station.”

Wynne cocked her head in concession and turned back around. Roose squeezed most of the excess water out of her sponge and left it sitting on the edge of the bathtub to dry itself out. Wynne sunk back into the warm bathwater to wash the suds off before she dunked her head again, staying underwater to untangle the pile of hair and let the goop slough off. “Do your vassals know I’m a skinchanger?” she asked him after she put her eyeglasses back on and watched him bathe himself with impunity as the glass fogged up around the rims. “Because _that_ is why I only have one lady-in-waiting. Ellara has known what I am since we were little girls playing monsters-and-maidens, and I haven’t scared her away yet.”

“I’m sure my lady was quite the fearsome monster,” Roose murmured, one corner of his mouth quirked up into a faint teasing smile.

Wynne smiled back, shyly. “How dare my lord insinuate that I was anything but a maiden,” she retorted primly.

Roose chuckled. “Bertram tells me you’ve spoken with the farmers about the summer harvest,” he said.

Wynne nodded and bit her bottom lip in a futile attempt to contain her excitement. “Maester Appert discovered a new method of food preservation,” she informed him, “he calls it appertization. If you seal the food in glass bottles or jars or even tin cans and boil the sealed container, the food inside gains a shelf life of up to five years. Maester Appert has preserved meat, eggs, milk, fruit and vegetables with his methodology. I thought it would be wise to summon a new maester from the Citadel—one trained in this method—to show our farmers how to do it so we can store a portion of the fruit and vegetables harvested in late summer for winter and start canning soup and stew.”

Roose was mildly astonished by her ingenuity. When she asked his permission to summon a new maester two months ago, he assumed it was because Uthor was an old man and it would be prudent to start training his replacement. Barbrey had told him years ago that Wynne kept up with new scientific developments and experiments being conducted by the maesters at the Citadel and corresponded with her granduncle Willifer often, but he never expected her to arrange such a thing. “I am pleased by your clever plan,” he said, “and by your sharp mind. If next winter lasts anywhere near as long as this summer has, we’ll be needing every bit of food we can store.”

Wynne flushed at the praise. Not of her looks, but of her cleverness. Wynne knew he married her because he wanted to fuck her, but she was more than just his _little wife_; she was the daughter of two great houses, born and bred to rule a great keep, and she was a greenseer with the blood of the Barrow Kings of old and the High King of the First Men in her veins. So while she liked getting fucked by Roose, being his bedwarmer wasn’t all she was capable of doing.

Roose was aware of that, undoubtedly. After he witnessed her wield a weapon and murder someone in cold blood, her lord of Bolton took her hunting and taught her to shoot a crossbow instead of forbidding her to carry her doloire. Roose wanted her the way she was—greensight and battle axe and all. When he proposed to her, he wasn’t only thinking with his cock. Roose had wed her because he stood to gain something from their marriage.

Wynne tipped her head back into the water and rinsed the persistent residue of the goop out; her fingertips were beginning to shrivel up like prunes and she was so hungry that her stomach actually growled, the bathwater swallowing the sound.

“May I ask what you discussed with the Lord and Lady of Winterfell?” Roose whispered.

Wynne chewed on the inside of her cheek anxiously. “Jon Arryn is going to die,” she whispered back. “I don’t know how or when, but I do know who.”

Roose frowned at her. “Lord Arryn,” he said, “the Hand of the King?”

Wynne nodded succinctly. “When he does,” she whispered, “King Robert will appoint Lord Stark as his successor. I haven’t dreamed of that, but it’s the logical conclusion.”

Roose made a soft noise in agreement. “Tywin Lannister ruled the realm for twenty years as Hand to Mad King Aerys,” he whispered back, “but Robert Baratheon has a Lannister queen and a Lannister knight in his Kingsguard. Too many lions in the Red Keep already.”

Wynne tugged her bottom lip between her teeth and gnawed. _Cersei Lannister cuckolded the king and fucked her twin brother_, she thought, _all three of her children are incest-begotten bastards. Too many lions, indeed_.


	9. Blood of the Dragon {I}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 8: Blood of the Dragon {I}
> 
> Wynne has an unexpected visitor, who comes bearing a sword and a secret.

**Where is the moral?**  
**Not all knives are for**  
**stabbing the exposed belly.**

Anne Sexton, “Red Riding Hood”

* * *

**☙ ⅠⅩ ❧**

297 AC

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

It took her a fortnight after the wedding celebrations ended to open all of the wedding gifts, compare the guest list to her list of who sent gifts, and write personalized letters of gratitude to everyone. Magnars, Stanes, and Crowls never left the island of Skagos if they could avoid doing so, but the old Lord of Deepdown was Roose’s uncle and he sent a chest of unicorn horns and pelts. Wynne had found a glass candle made of green obsidian wrapped in a black unicorn hide. It began to burn after the sharp edge tasted her blood. When her things were moved from the guest tower solar into the lady’s chambers, the candle was still aflame.

After living at the fortress for four months, the castle had begun to feel like home. This wasn’t the first time she had uprooted herself. Now that she was the Lady of the Dreadfort, her duties had increased. Wynne presided over the gardens, library, rookery, mews, stables, kitchens, napery, scullery, ewery, and laundry, so all the household officers were subject to her as much as Roose. If not moreso. Since they had been running the keep without a lady for years, she could proceed in one of two ways. Either she could be ornamental as a figurehead adorning the prow of a ship or she could adroitly exert her authority in a subtly unobtrusive manner in order to avoid ruffling any feathers or wounding any pride. Wynne had chosen the latter, and thus far everything was running smoothly.

In the mornings, Roose slipped out of bed to practice his swordplay for a few hours before he returned to his bedchamber; he favored a double-bladed style, fighting with a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other. Although he worked on household matters at night and woke up late, he needed few hours of sleep. Wynne, contrariwise, needed more sleep than most people because her magic always took its toll. Thus, her day had fewer waking hours than his. In the afternoons when the castle wasn’t open for petitions or halimotes, she went to the glass greenhouses to check on the transplants her mother had brought from Barrowton: strawberries, nectarines, blackberries, pecan hickory trees, black walnut trees, lemon tree flower buds grafted onto rootstock from hardier bush lemon shrubs, pumpkins, striped tiger zucchini, sunburst, zucchetta, straightneck and crookneck squash, pomegranate shrubs, medicinal herbs and giant sunflowers. Most of her plants were things only a greenseer could grow in a northern climate. Domeric had told her that his father liked prunes, so Lady Barbrey had brought Wynne cuttings from her freestone plum trees—her mother couldn’t bring any of the older fruit trees she had grown, because all of them were ten feet tall or taller and rooted deep in the soil where they were planted.

When she returned to her chamber, Roose was sitting in the chair behind her desk. “My lady,” he said and held up a scroll adorned with the sigil of a direwolf stamped in white sealing wax that glittered with silver dust, “a message from Winterfell. Addressed to you.”

It took a sennight to travel from Winterfell to the Dreadfort. Only two weeks had passed since the wedding, a fortnight since Lord Stark had sent a message to Lord Stannis using one of her ravens from the rookery at the Dreadfort in the aftermath of their conversation in the guest tower solar. Not enough time for a raven to wing all the way from the Dreadfort to Dragonstone to Winterfell and back to the Dreadfort again, so this message couldn’t be about the impending death of Jon Arryn or the cuckolding of King Robert. Wynne adjusted her eyeglasses with two fingers and held her hand out wordlessly.

Roose held her gaze and broke the seal on the scroll with a slice of the dagger he wore belted at his waist. Wynne frowned at her husband, surprised that he hadn’t opened it already; reading her correspondence was something he was entitled to do as her lord and master, unfortunately. Roose sheathed his dagger with a sharp metallic sound and offered the roll of parchment to her. Wynne took it with a sliver of a smile and moved to lean against the corner of her desk, since her chair was occupied. Roose sinuously rose to his feet and stared down at her as she unrolled the message and read it aloud, one of his hands on the edge of her desk beside her while the other splayed over the curve of her waist.

_Lady Bolton_,

_I took my daughters hawking on the way home to Winterfell, and Sansa did something very strange. When she released her gyrfalcon, she tipped her head back and stared at the sky with her eyes gone white. I have overheard my husband’s men-at-arms whispering that she is a skinchanger, a beastling._

_Maester Luwin says those who slip into the skins of birds can lose themselves to thoughts of flight and they fly in the skins of their birds while their human bodies waste away_. _It’s said that all greenseers are skinchangers, but not all skinchangers are greenseers. Lady Bolton, I must ask that you help Sansa. If she cannot stop being a skinchanger, then she must learn how to control it._

_I do not ask this of you without offering you something in return. Ned is willing to betroth Sansa to Domeric Bolton, your cousin and goodson. Lord Bolton made the offer on behalf of his son and heir years ago, and we have been told Domeric is not promised to another. Ned is reluctant to let Sansa go, but fostering her at the Dreadfort would give her an opportunity to get better acquainted with her betrothed and to learn from you. My husband knows as well as I do that no one else can help her._

_Catelyn of House Tully and House Stark, Lady of Winterfell_

It was undersigned _Eddard of House Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North_, with his seal affixed in black ink. Which made the betrothal official.

“Lady Sansa is a skinchanger,” Roose said as she rolled the parchment back up and tucked it away in a drawer of her desk, quelling her cautious gut instinct to burn it using the flame of her glass candle.

Wynne looked up into his eyes. Lurking in his gaze was a glint that she knew intimately by now, a look that made her skin flush hot and her spine tingle as heat flooded in between her thighs and stained her smallclothes. It had taken her a fortnight to open all of their wedding gifts and write personalized letters of gratitude to everyone because he kept _distracting _her. Apparently her husband enjoyed fucking her on top of desks—or bent over them. _Lady Sansa isn’t the only skinchanger in Winterfell_, she thought, _all of the Stark children are wargs. I know it. One skinchanger can always sense another_. “I should pen a response to Lady Stark,” she told him.

“Yes,” Roose said in his quiet deep voice, “you should.”

Then he cupped her face in one strong hand and skimmed his callused thumb over her cheek before he tilted her chin up and kissed her. Wynne opened her mouth for him and Roose flicked his tongue slowly inside, sought the places that he knew would make her moan after taking every opportunity to kiss her for the past two weeks; he ruthlessly devoured the noises she made as she hooked an arm around his neck, his grip on her waist tightening almost to the point of cruelty as she pressed herself against his chest and bolstered the palm of her other hand flat over his heart. This was a man unaccustomed to gentleness, though he was accustomed to sweetening his power with courtesy.

Roose growled into her mouth when someone had the impudence to interrupt him by knocking on her door. “No,” he whispered to her when she moved as if to answer. “Stay where you are.”

Wynne arched her eyebrows at him before she wordlessly unfurled one of her arms and curled her fingers like claws into the hollow of her palm; the heavy wooden door opened as if by magic and when Roose looked into her eyes the hazel shimmered with glowing sparks of green. This was a power he had seen her use to recall her axe from the center of its target without touching it, and to reclaim quarrels from the corpses of animals she felled along the river during their afternoon hunts. Wynne had explained that her magic worked on all manner of earthly things, even dead wood.

Sometimes he looked at her and saw a pretty young girl. Sometimes he looked at his wife and saw her looking back as though she could see through him. Sometimes he looked at her and saw weakness. Not hers, but his own. It was infuriating that she possessed the power to make him feel anything at all.

Roose disentangled himself from her as the door quietly swung itself shut behind a short plump young lady with dark ash brown hair and iron grey eyes, clad in a silk gown that belonged in a much warmer place. It had wide straps that flared into points over her pale freckled shoulders like small outspread wings instead of sleeves and a modest square neckline trimmed in black floral lace, the fabric shimmering from the palest green and gold at the bodice to skirts of bronze, ruby and plum. Roose caught sight of the wyvern pendant around her neck, wrought in silver; she wore a matching girdle set with hematite cabochons and orbs of obsidian, and a signet ring on the middle finger of her right hand. Another ring bloomed on the middle finger of her left in the shape of a golden rose—one with steel thorns. It matched the ornaments in her hair, her tresses intricately braided and curled in a style that was unmistakably southron. Fingerless leather gloves adorned her arms, lined with raw silk and fastened with buckles made of celestrium; her eyeglasses were forged of the same alloy, while the handle of the cane she used was embossed silver.

This woman had fine cheekbones, a thin upper lip accentuated by a full bottom lip, huge deepset eyes and delicately arched dark eyebrows, a tiny upturned snub of a nose; she was older than Wynne, but not by much; and she was quite obviously with child, at least six moons gone. Roose felt her assessing him with shrewd eyes and he smoothed all modicum of expression out of his face as he wondered how she came to be here in the North, in the dark heart of his fortress. It had to be some migratory sort of magic. Elsewise, his guards would have notified him of her arrival at his gates and confiscated the slender longsword that she carried with the blade wrapped in a thick black cloak instead of a sheath. There was no way to sneak into the Dreadfort, he had made quite sure of that. Especially not for the very pregnant wife of a southron lord, which she clearly was. There was more to her than just that, of course; she had the same manner of looking right through him that Wynne possessed, as though she could see beneath his skin and into his soul. _Another greenseer_, Roose deduced.

At his sharp questioning glance, his wife looked back at him and her lips curled into a radiant smile that he had never seen before. Wynne stepped out from behind her desk, unaware of the way his mouth had gone dry as his gaze lingered ever fixed on her. “My lord of Bolton,” she began. “May I present Mayseline of House Vyrwel and House Tyrell, Lady Regnant of Darkdell, younger sister of Ser Lorent Caswell, Lord of Bitterbridge and Defender of the Fords, wife of Willas Tyrell, Lord of Darkdell and heir to Highgarden, and gooddaughter of Mace Tyrell, Lord of Highgarden, Lord Paramount of the Mander, Defender of the Marches, High Marshal of the Reach and Warden of the South.”

“Lady Olenna calls him Lord Oaf,” Mayseline deadpanned and formed her long vowels with the flourishing cadence of the Reach, “but that’s her prerogative as his mother.”

Roose chuckled. Mayseline Tyrell had a reputation that preceded her even in the North. When smallfolk learned their children were skinchangers, they left them out in the wilderness to die. Those abandoned children were hunted down if they survived to adulthood. Most of them had nowhere to run, so they starved to death or went feral and were put down like dogs. But in the Reach, skinchangers had somewhere to run: Darkdell, the ancestral seat of House Vyrwel. Lord Vyrwel had taken his niece into fosterage after she began to show telltale signs of being a beastling and Lord Caswell, her widowed father, threw her away. Since he never married and he only had bastard children, Lord Vyrwel made his niece his heir. When he died of summer fever, eleven-year-old Mayseline became Lady Regnant of Darkdell with her great-great-grandmothers as her regents. In the eight years since then, a town where thousands of skinchangers and their creatures lived had grown around the castle. Those who dwelled in the Reach called it the City of Beasts. _My little wife has powerful friends_, he thought. “Lady Mayseline,” he greeted. “Welcome to the Dreadfort.”

When she was a girl of ten, Wynne opened her third eye and looked at the world. It spread out before her, everyone and everything. Wynne looked north and saw her mother and Cregard at Barrow Hall, Mel at Mormont Keep and Domeric at the Redfort, Bloodraven rooted deep in his cave beyond the Wall; she looked west all the way to Lannisport and east to Dragonstone and beyond. Dragons soared in the bright sky above the Shadow Lands, and Dothraki horselords rode in their hordes through great kingdoms of verdant grass.

Then she looked south, and for the first time someone else looked _back_.

Mayseline was the only person in the realm who understood her resentment of her powers, her incessant frustration with how obscure the metaphors in her green dreams were. Although the symbolism in her visions had gotten less inscrutable of late. Mayhaps being acquiescent to her gods-given role as a greenseer had made her prophetic dreams more perspicuous.

“Bloodraven sent you,” Wynne deduced and narrowed her eyes at the sword Mayseline carried, “that’s his cloak from back when he was Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and that is…”

Mayseline nodded. “Dark Sister,” she said and unwrapped the longsword with a flutter of tattered sable fabric. “Blackfyre has proven more difficult to reclaim. Ser Barristan returned the blade to House Targaryen after he slew Maelys the Monstrous, and thus it remains locked away in the royal treasury.”

“Queen Visenya Targaryen’s ancestral sword,” Roose murmured, “Valyrian steel forged centuries before the Conquest.”

Mayseline snorted. “Your husband _would _know his blades.”

Wynne gnawed on the inside of her cheek anxiously. “I cannot wield a sword,” she said. “Knives, yes. Axe, yes. Dagger, yes. Longbow, yes. Crossbow, yes. This?” she flailed one hand obliquely at the lustrous steel. “No.”

Mayseline scoffed. “Don’t be coy,” she retorted, “you know it’s not for you. This sword is meant for the one that was promised.”

“Who?” Roose wanted to know.

Fear coiled tight in the muscles of her back, drawing her taut as a bowstring and nocking her anxiety along her spine like an arrow. Wynne bit her lip as she looked at her dread lord and husband over the nervous hunch of her shoulder. Roose was amoral—a cold man with a chilling lack of ethics who thought of people as his playthings. Wynne had known she wouldn’t be able to keep her darkest secret from him forever, but he was not the sort of man to whom the fate of the realm should be entrusted. “Five thousand years ago,” she told him, “a prophecy was made by a sorcerer who tasted the blood of a dragonlord from House Targaryen of Valyria and it was recorded by the spellsingers of Asshai in one of their ancient texts. ‘When the red star bleeds and the cold winds blow, the long summer will end and the prince that was promised shall rise to deliver the world from darkness. This promised one shall be Azor Ahai come again, born amidst salt and smoke to wake dragons out of stone and draw forth the burning sword from the flames to bring the dawn, for his is the song of ice and fire.’ Jaehaerys the Clever wed his son to his daughter because a woodswitch said the prince that was promised would be born of their line.”

“I take it you believe this prophecy will come true,” Roose deduced in a soft voice devoid of inflection.

Wynne curled her small hand around the hilt of Dark Sister and put the sword on her desk; the flickering light from her glass candle made the steel come alive, the honed edge gleaming ominously. “Look,” she mumbled and pointed with one finger at the drop of fire coruscating on the loop of green obsidian where the wick of the glass candle had long since burned to ash, “see in the flames what I see north of the Wall every time I open my third eye, and tell me that I’m wrong.”

Then she waited. Roose peered into the flames with his brow furrowed, his hands folded in front of him; she watched his expressionless face, the fire casting malleable shadows over his cheeks and glittering in his cold pale eyes. When he saw what she could see, he _recoiled_. Nothing about his expression changed, but something in his shoulders tensed and he exhaled with enough force to flare his nostrils. Comprehension dawned as Roose looked back at her, because he had seen her do enough magic by now to know that what he had seen wasn’t an illusion or a trick of the light. _If only_, she thought. “They’re real,” he whispered, “the Others and their wights are _real_. Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”

Wynne sighed ruefully. _Because I trust you with my body_, she thought, _but never with my soul_. “I didn’t have the glass candle,” she told him.

Mayseline held up all the fingers of her left hand with her thumb folded into her palm. “We believe four things. One,” she held up one finger, “the prophecy is foretelling the long night that never ends and the war against the Others will be the prophesized War for the Dawn. What has been shall be again. Two,” she held up two fingers, “the ‘song of ice and fire’ refers to those born with both the blood of the First Men and Old Valyria whose hybridized magic is stronger than either the greenseers of old or the dragonlords from before the Doom. If you want proof of that interpretation, look no further than us. Three,” she held up three fingers, “three dragons have already been hatched from the seven eggs clutched by Vermax in the crypts beneath Winterfell during the Dance of the Dragons. We have seen them. Four, the ‘prince’ that was promised is actually a princess.”

Wynne sighed again in a futile attempt to unclench. “We know of three ways to kill the Others and their wights,” she informed him, “Valyrian steel, fire, and dragonglass. Which is why I’ve had your miners stockpiling obsidian for months.”

“It’s also why Mance Rayder has made peace amongst the wildlings and is marching them toward the Wall,” Mayseline added, “he’s sent raiders to search for the Horn of Winter along the Milkwater. Joramun’s horn, a horn imbued with magic that he thinks can bring down the Wall in one blow. It’s a pity there’s nothing left of the horn for them to find.”

Wynne rubbed her temple with two fingers the way she always did when she began to feel a migraine in her back teeth. “How is Antimony?” she asked.

“Antimony?” Roose murmured.

Mayseline grinned and began gesticulating, talking with her hands as much as her mouth. “Maelor Targaryen, son of Aegon the Usurper and Queen Helaena Targaryen, was torn apart by a mob of peasants at Bitterbridge in 130 AC,” she informed him, “he had a pale green dragon egg swirled with silver that my ancestress sent to Longtable before her castle was sacked by Daeron the Daring and she hanged herself from the gatehouse because she thought death by noose was preferable to death by dragonfire. Prince Maelor’s egg was returned to House Targaryen by Lyonel Hightower after his father Lord Ormund died in the First Battle of Tumbleton. Then, in 135 AC, it was removed from the Red Keep by Aegon the Dragonbane along with all the other dragon eggs and hoarded by his younger brother Viserys, who later reigned as Viserys the Shrewd. Viserys passed that egg down to his daughter Queen Naerys, who passed it down to her son Daeron the Good, who passed it down to his son Maekar the Anvil, who passed it down to his son Daeron the Drunken, who passed it down to his daughter Vaella, who took it with her to Darkdell when she married my great-grandfather. Where it remained until I hatched it. Antimony is a dragon,” she clarified, “_my _dragon, and she’s as healthy as any of Willas’s hawks, hounds and horses. Which is why he’s worried that she might eat them, and why she isn’t allowed in the mews or the kennels or the stables at Highgarden. If she keeps growing at the rate she is, she’ll outgrow her glamor and I’ll have to send her back to Darkdell. Where she can den in the alabaster caves. I would ask you how your dragon eggs are, but we both know that you still haven’t attempted to hatch either of them.”

Bloodraven had implored Mayseline to travel through the trees and reclaim the pair of dragon eggs that Lady Rhaena Targaryen had left in the Vale during the Dance of the Dragons, the seven hoarded on Dragonstone after the pyromancers failed to hatch them at Summerhall, the clutch of three laid by Silverwing at the Wall, and the one that had once belonged to Aerion the Monstrous. Mayseline had brought each of them to Wynne in the godswood at Barrow Hall where only the eyes of the heart tree could see them, but all the eggshells felt stone cold to the touch. Over a dozen eggs and none of them were hers. Wynne had given up hope. “Neither of the eggs I have are meant for me,” she mumbled. “If I was the one meant to hatch them, their shells would feel hot. I am not Targaryen enough.”

Mayseline rolled her eyes. “Bloodraven doesn’t agree,” she retorted. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have entrusted the dragon egg he stole from Ambrose Butterwell to you, especially since he knew you already had the egg that belonged to your great-great-great-grandmother.”

Aegon the Unworthy had gifted a red dragon egg with flecks of gold and whorls of black to Lord Butterwell, the one who built Whitewalls and served him as Hand of the King, after he visited Lord Harroway’s Town and he allegedly impregnated all three of the virgin daughters of his Hand in one night. Lord Ambrose Butterwell, who served as Master of Coin to Aegon the Unworthy and Hand of the King to Daeron the Good, conspired to foment the Second Blackfyre Rebellion in the name of Daemon the Younger. Bloodraven arrested him at the tourney Lord Ambrose held at Whitewalls to celebrate his wedding to a lady of House Frey in 212 AC and sent his sisters to steal the dragon egg. Wynne had another egg, one that had once belonged to Princess Elaena Targaryen. Princess Elaena had bastard twins with the Oakenfist, who himself was a legitimized bastard from Driftmark. Their daughter Jeyne Waters married the great-grandson of Lord Roderick Dustin. Lady Mya Rivers, one of the Great Bastards of Aegon the Unworthy and elder sister of Brynden Rivers, married her cousin Benedict Blackwood. Their daughter Betha married Aegon the Unlikely and she had a brother named Brynden whose daughter Agnes married into House Dustin. Lady Gwenys, younger twin sister of Mya, married Lord Vyrwel and they had twins who married Princess Daella Targaryen and Princess Rhae Targaryen.

House Vyrwel was essentially an unacknowledged cadet branch of House Targaryen through the female line, only without the incestuous marriages; a house of sleeping dragons awaiting their awakening. Alas, her bloodline was less draconic.

* * *

Wynne swallowed thickly as she escorted Mayseline back to the godswood from whence she came and watched as the wooden mouth of the weirwood opened wider and wider.

“Your husband didn’t know anything,” Mayseline said incredulously, “did he?”

Wynne made a scornful noise in the back of her throat. “I am not like you,” she retorted, “I didn’t get to marry the first boy I had a crush on and fulfill all my romantic fantasies. Your marriage and mine are not the same thing.”

“You’ve never had a crush on _anyone_,” Mayseline said, unfazed by her acerbic rebuke.

Wynne shrugged as her best friend stepped into the gaping maw of the heart tree; they did not bid each other goodbye, for Mayseline was always only an eyeblink away. “You’re not wrong,” she admitted. Wynne felt something for Roose, but “crush” was not the right word for it.

_Lust_, she thought as the weirwood shut its toothless mouth. _With a dollop of caution. Love isn’t part of our game, and it never will be_.

* * *

Roose stared at the glass candle on her desk out of the corner of his eye and exhaled a sigh heavy enough to slump his shoulders and shudder along his spine into the roiling pit of his stomach. Although he was no stranger to fear, this was something he never anticipated or even considered. White walkers were creatures from the tales that people told at night to frighten children in their beds, not real monsters. Only now he knew they were very real, because for a moment he had stood amongst them and looked upon their inhuman faces. Roose now lived in a world of eldritch magic and monsters and myths even though he was just a man with a sharp flensing knife and a mind honed even sharper, his innate affinity for bloodmagic notwithstanding. It wasn’t a comfortable thought to have. Those creatures were coming for him and he couldn’t do anything to stop it. Roose had never felt so powerless in his life. Wynne must have felt the same way, magic or not.

_My wife has known this was coming for years_, he thought._ How frightened she must have been, and must be even now_.

Wynne kept her secrets close to her heart because that was how she learned to survive in a world full of men who could hurt or kill her, where she was so much smarter than she should be and yet more delicate than she seemed. It made him want to protect her more than ever. “What other secrets aren’t you telling me, my lady?” he asked her when she returned to her chambers and shut the door behind her, shoulders bowed with a heavy burden that should never have been hers to carry.

“I see everyone and everything in the realm when I open my third eye,” Wynne said matter-of-factly as she delicately moved to stand before him and her autumnal eyes bored into his. “There is much I’m not telling you, my lord. Because unlike you, I don’t believe this is a game. If the Others and their army breach the Wall, we’re all dead. Our realm will become a land of darkness and cold. No kingdoms. No gods. No people. No trees. No sun. No fire. No light. No warmth. No life. _Nothing_. It won’t matter who sits on the Iron Throne, or who is the Warden of the North…” she bit her lip and held his cold gaze with an accusatory arch of her eyebrows before she whispered, “…or the King in the North. Because we’ll all be dead. Or worse, _un_dead.”

Roose smiled. _My wife doesn’t trust me_, he realized. _Smart girl_. “I understand that,” he whispered back and tucked a stray tendril of vermeil hair behind her ear. “No wonder you enjoy it when I make you stop thinking,” he said in his softest voice and stroked the curve of her ear with the rough pad of his thumb, “if this is what you’ve been thinking about.”

Wynne dissolved in a fit of giggles and slapped both hands over her mouth to muffle the shrill noise as she hunched over, her shoulders gnarled like the roots of ancient trees.

Roose had made his wife laugh before, though he had never been a humorous man. It made warmth bloom in the dark, cold depths of his chest to hear the unbridled shrieks and know he was the one who had coaxed such an unladylike sound from her throat. Pretty laughter always sounded fake to him, but ugly laughter was real.

“Thank you.” Wynne unsnarled her shoulders and smiled back at him shyly. “I needed that.”

Roose smiled wider, but didn’t bare his teeth in the predatory manner that he had grown accustomed to. “Go and write your response to Lady Stark,” he murmured. “Come and lunch with me in my chambers when you’re done. I am far from finished with you.”


	10. Blood of the Dragon {II}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 9: Blood of the Dragon {II}
> 
> Ned Stark reveals the perilous truth of their parentage to his niece and nephew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HERE THERE BE DRAGONS.

**We name it the past and drag it behind us,**  
**a bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,**  
**dreams of running, the keys to lost names.**

Dorianne Laux, “Dark Charms”

* * *

**☙ Ⅹ ❧**

297 AC

_At Winterfell, the ancestral seat of House Stark, on the eastern edge of the wolfswood in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

When she was a girl of six, Alysanne Snow hatched three dragon eggs.

Aly found the clutch in the cavern below the crypts beneath Winterfell one afternoon, seven in all. She tripped over one of them, stubbed her big toe, and cut her hands on the stone that broke her fall. Aly forced herself not to cry and she noticed one of the eggs, the pale blue and silver one that shone like ice, felt oddly warm to the touch. She carried three of them out of the crypts after her palms stopped bleeding, cradling them in her arms; one of them was black and steel grey, the other was dark blue and stannic black, like pure iron. Aly left the eggs by the fire burning the hearth and fell into deep, dreamless sleep.

When she woke, she beheld three baby dragons and bits of cracked eggshell all over her bedroom floor. Aly crouched in front of them and grinned so wide it hurt as the silver and blue one crawled over to bury its face in her belly and nuzzle her while the black and grey one crawled up one of her arms to perch on her shoulder; the black and blue one did not seem to like her as much, but perhaps he was just shy. Or too sullen and proud for his own good, like her twin brother Jon sometimes was. “Frostfyre,” she named them. “Steelsong. Proudwing.”

Aly kept her dragons hidden in the crypts and brought the other eggs up into her room, but none of them hatched. Jon never came down past the highest level with her because he was afraid of the dark. Aly made sure that people believed the lowest level had caved in so no one would go exploring as she had and discover her secret.

When she broke her fast at table with her half-siblings and their lord father the next morning she thought about telling him, but some instinct always held her back. Maybe she never trusted him with her secret because he never told her about her mother even though she asked and asked and asked. Jon never did, but once he told Aly that he dreamed of their mother sometimes. In his dreams she was beautiful and highborn, and her eyes were kind. Aly never told Jon about the dragons either because she knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret from their brother Robb, and _he_ wouldn’t be able to keep it a secret from Theon or their lord father. It was tricksy, and she had almost told Jon so many times, but in the end she held her tongue and kept her secret by the skin of her teeth. Arya tried following her once she was old enough to get underfoot, so Aly showed her sister the secret tunnels she unearthed and kept her well away from the dragons. Those secret tunnels provided her with an excuse for why she always spent her free time with the dead, underground or up in the library tower.

Aly descended the spiral stone stairs of the crypts with a torch and a book every chance she got and read to her dragons by firelight. Frostfyre was hers in a way Steelsong and Proudwing weren’t, and she had hoped that meant one of them was Jon’s. Aly began to dream of being a dragon, of lurking in the shadows of the crypts and breathing fire to roast the rats who had the misfortune to creep past her. Jon seldom dreamed of dragonfire, but he often dreamed of darkness and cold. Aly skinchanged into Frostfyre and shared part of herself with her dragon, and in doing so became a dragon herself.

When her dragons grew large, cattle and sheep mysteriously began to vanish from the farms around Winterfell at night. Aly found charred bones in the crypts, sold the char to a sugar refinery in Winter Town, and sent the coin she earned to the farmers whose livestock her dragons had eaten. There wasn’t much else that she could do. Aly wore old gowns that had belonged to her Aunt Lyanna and were two decades out of fashion, her father wouldn’t allow her to be an apprentice in Winter Town or Barrowton or White Harbor, and she had no coin of her own and no dowry or marriage prospects to speak of. Lord Eddard did allow her to train at arms along with Jon, Robb, and Theon Greyjoy, his smiling ward, and she was a better swordsman than any of them. Theon was better with a bow, though. Robb was a better lance than any of them.

Jon could be a household guard or become a maester or learn a trade or join the Night’s Watch like their Uncle Benjen had, but unfortunately Aly didn’t have the same opportunities. Girls weren’t soldiers or knights or maesters. Girls couldn’t join the Night’s Watch, unless they wanted to end up raped and murdered like Brave Danny Flint. Girls weren’t even supposed to know how to use a sword. Aunt Lyanna had wanted to learn, but their grandfather Lord Rickard would not allow it.

Aly being a bastard meant she could use a sword. It also meant that no highborn lord or lord’s son would ever marry her. Not that Aly particularly _wanted_ to marry a highborn lord or a lordling, but having the option would have been nice. Lady Catelyn obviously didn’t want her or Jon at Winterfell, so being fostered or apprenticed at another keep or holdfast or town would have appeased her. Aly _hated_ the Lady of Winterfell for the way she was always looking down her nose at her and her twin brother. It wasn’t their fault their father had gotten their mother with child, but apparently blaming the bastard children for existing was easier than blaming the man who sired them for breaking his marriage vows.

Jon cried when they were children because Lady Catelyn hated them so much that she never called them by name and because of all their sisters, only tiny fierce Arya thought of them as more than half-siblings. Sansa was much too polite to scowl or sneer at them, so instead she pretended they didn’t exist. Lyanna did everything Sansa did. Lorra was only two and she was too young to understand what being a bastard meant, but Lady Catelyn glowered at them whenever Aly or Jon held her or played with her.

Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn took all of their children except Arya to attend the wedding at the Dreadfort. Jon taught Arya how to hold a wooden practice sword, the same one Aly had learned to fight with before Ser Rodrik had let her touch live steel. Theon had sulked for a week because he wasn’t invited, sneaking out to spend his nights with tavern wenches at the Smoking Log and stumbling back through the gates of Winterfell hungover in the mornings.

Aly pitied Kyra and Bessa, the girls who lived in Winter Town and worked at the tavern. Theon was a prick who thought with his prick, who looked at women and only saw a pair of teats and holes to fuck. Aly wasn’t close with Sansa, but the way Theon sometimes looked at her eleven-year-old sister made her skin crawl with revulsion.

When her lord father returned, she knew something was terribly wrong. Sansa was so frightened that her posture was hunched and unladylike, her eyes downcast as though she were afraid to look up. Lady Catelyn wore a grim expression and Lord Eddard had looked more solemn than he ever had before, which was saying a lot.

Jon moved to stand beside her. Although he was her twin, they did not look alike. Jon bore the surname Snow, but he had the lean frame and long angular face of a Stark. Unruly dark brown hair fell past his shoulders, his eyes were a grey so dark they were almost black, and his brown skin had been darkened by the sun. Aly had hair that shone like silver and pale gold, and her eyes were violet; her skin was fair, her frame more shapely than slender, and she was tall for a girl and still growing. Jon wore a grey woolen tunic, a black leather jerkin, brown leather breeches and boots. Aly wore one of her summer gowns: velvet in the pale shade of wintergreen that fluttered on the banners of House Stark over a white silk kirtle with a high collar, a soft white linen shift, lambswool stockings and doeskin boots.

“There’s something wrong,” her twin murmured.

Aly nodded in agreement. _Very wrong_, she thought as Lady Catelyn glanced at them without glaring daggers.

Their half-brother Robb dismounted from his courser and handed the reins off to one of the stableboys before he went to greet the bastards of Winterfell. Robb Stark was muscular while Jon was slender, fair while Jon was dark, and strong and fast while Jon was graceful and quick; his shoulders and chest were broad, and he had long auburn hair and blue eyes like his lady mother. “Father wants to speak with us,” he said. “We’re to meet him and Mother in his solar in half an hour.”

Aly looked at Jon over her shoulder after Robb hugged each of them in turn and went to change out of his riding leathers and traveling cloak. “Father wants to speak with us,” she echoed with a hint of unease in her voice.

“Maybe he’s arranged a marriage for you,” Jon whispered conspiratorially.

Aly choked on her ensuing wheeze of laughter and buried her face in the fabric of his sleeve to muffle the sound against his shoulder. “I doubt it,” she whispered back.

Their father’s solar was in the lord’s chambers on the sixth and highest floor of the Great Keep, the stronghold within the walls of Winterfell that was built atop natural hot springs with bronze pipes that pumped scalding water through its walls like blood rushing in the veins of a man’s body. Open pools steamed in small courtyards, heated the rich earth that might have otherwise frozen in winter, and kept the halls of stone warm. Their father’s rooms adjoined the lady’s chambers where Lady Catelyn slept, the hottest rooms in the keep for a woman born and bred south of the Neck.

Aly slept in the rooms on the third floor that had once belonged to her Aunt Lyanna. Robb slept in the rooms on the fifth floor that had once belonged to their dead Uncle Brandon, the rooms of the heir to Winterfell. Jon slept in the rooms on the second floor that had once belonged to Uncle Benjen. Bran and Rickon both slept in the rooms on the fourth floor that had once belonged to their lord father, where he slept when he wasn’t in the Eyrie. Sansa, Lyanna, Jeyne and Beth all slept in the other set of rooms on the third floor. Arya shared her rooms on the second floor with Lorra, while the household guards slept in shifts on the first floor. There were smaller bedchambers on each floor where the chamberlain and chambermaids slept.

Lord Eddard was standing behind his roughhewn desk of plank and trestle with his wife seated in his great oak chair with its grey velvet cushions. Robb stood in no-man’s-land between the twins, his mother and their father. Lord Eddard cleared his throat as Jon shut the door behind them. “Jon,” he said, “Aly. There is no easy way to say this.”

Aly clutched at her own hands with fingers like claws as dread suffused her stomach and dropped, her breath torn out of her lungs in a harsh exhalation. _No easy way to say what? _she thought. _Are we being sent away from Winterfell?_

“Now you’re both sixteen,” he said, “a man and woman grown. It’s time you knew the truth. I have been your father, but though you are my blood, you were never my seed. Aly,” he smiled at her and his expression was so full of sorrow that it made her heart hurt, “you’ve asked me about your mother so many times. Jon, you never once asked me about her even though I knew you wanted to. Not saying her name is one of the hardest things I have ever done. Lyanna, my sister, was your mother. I loved her with all my heart,” his voice faltered around the lump of grief in his throat and he swallowed thickly before he said, “and before she died she made me promise to protect you.”

Aly reeled as her world tilted askew, her mind racing. Lyanna Stark, whom their father said was beautiful and willful and dead before her time. Lyanna Stark, whom Prince Rhaegar Targaryen had captured and _raped_. Lyanna Stark, her mother, and Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, her father, who led the royalist armies into battle against the rebel forces who declared war against the king after he murdered two hundred noblemen, among them his Warden of the North, her grandfather Lord Rickard, his heir, her Uncle Brandon, and Elbert Arryn, the heir to the Eyrie. “Rhaegar Targaryen is our father,” she whispered in horror, “our father raped our mother.”

“No.” Lord Eddard—_Uncle Ned_, she thought, and it almost made her laugh at how viscerally wrong that felt even though nothing about this was amusing—shook his head with slow vehemence.

Lady Catelyn nodded. “Prince Rhaegar and Lyanna were married by the High Septon,” she said, “the one before the fat one. Your mother never wanted to marry King Robert.”

“If our parents were married,” Jon said incredulously, “our name isn’t Snow. We’re not bastards,” he turned and looked at his sister with unshed tears shining in his eyes. “We never were.”

Aly turned on Lord Eddard, hackles up like a proper she-wolf. “You lied to me my whole life!” she howled at the solemn man who despite everything was still the only father that she had ever known. “You say it was to keep me safe? You made me a bastard! You made me think I was born of lust and lies, that my existence itself was a sin. You made me hate myself! I _hate_ you,” she broke and choked on a torrent of sobs as her tears pricked the corners of her eyes as sharp as thorns and spilled hot over her cheeks, “both of you!”

Lord Eddard looked stricken; Lady Catelyn had the grace to look contrite. It was Robb who folded her into his arms, who held her as her whole body shook with the violence of her weeping and tears stained his doublet. Jon wept quietly as his twin sister took his hand and dragged him into the embrace of their cousin who had always been their brother. It felt as though someone had died.

In a way, someone had. Jon and Aly mourned the lives they’d never live, the father they never knew, the half-siblings they had never met, the mother who died bringing them both into the world.

“You’re still my sister,” Robb whispered and broke the quiet that had settled over the solar like a shroud. “Jon will always be my brother. This changes nothing.”

Aly thought of her dragons, and of the eggs still waiting to hatch in the crypts beneath Winterfell. _I’m a princess_, she thought, _and my twin brother is a prince. Aegon is sworn to the Night’s Watch, so Jon is the rightful heir to the Iron Throne. If the king finds out, he’ll have our heads_. “You’re wrong,” she whispered back. “This changes everything.”

“There’s something else,” Lord Eddard said. “We’ve betrothed Sansa to Domeric Bolton.”

Aly sniffled and snot dripped from her nose. “What?” she asked.

“Sansa is a skinchanger,” Robb explained. “Lady Bolton is a skinchanger and a greenseer, like something from one of Old Nan’s stories. Mother hopes she’ll be able to help our sister learn to control her magic.”

Aly overheard the servants gossiping about the bride during the week before the wedding. Lady Bolton was born Wynne Dustin, the only daughter of Lord Willam Dustin and Lady Barbrey Ryswell, who had two bastard children by Uncle Brandon. Cregard Snow had married his cousin Lady Raelyne Ryswell and gotten a child on her—a child that would not be named Snow. Mel Snow lived on Bear Island, and Dacey Mormont had taken her as her paramour. Wynne Bolton was only a year older than Aly, but she was highborn and she had married one of the most powerful lords in the North. Lord Bolton was over a quarter of a century older than his bride and he had abnegated the lands and titles that came with her, it was said, because he was in love. There were those who believed Lady Bolton was a fearsome monster, but more people whispered of the succulent fruit and delicious vegetables that had been growing on Bolton lands ever since their lady began to dwell in the Dreadfort. Most people believed that skinchangers were abominations, but greensight was a blessing from the gods. Wynne Bolton was gods-touched as the High King of the First Men buried in the cairn beneath her ancestral seat had been, and like Garth Greenhand she made flowers bloom, trees fruit and crops ripen.

Lady Catelyn nodded. “I know the Boltons do not have the best reputation,” she murmured, “but Lady Bolton is trustworthy and Domeric is a good match for Sansa. Jon,” she looked apologetic when he stared at her because it was the first time she had ever called him by his name, “I would have you and Robb escort Sansa to the Dreadfort after the harvest feast. Lady Bolton and Domeric will be attending.”

Domeric had learned to ride at two as every Ryswell did, and he outraced their Aunt Lyanna—_their mother_—at three on his first yearling. Sansa fervently _hated _riding. Domeric read histories, whereas Sansa was enchanted by songs and chivalric love stories in which princes were always handsome and knights were always honorable and good. There weren’t many knights in the North, so reality couldn’t burst the bubble of her fantasies. Domeric had been nothing but kind to Aly and Jon whenever he stayed overnight at Winterfell during his frequent trips both to and from Barrow Hall. When scrofulous Yellow Dick attempted to force himself on her, Domeric had stopped his father’s man-at-arms and threatened to flay the fingers of the hand he used to touch Aly against her will before he escorted her to the Great Keep himself and bid her goodnight. It was quite gallant of him, in a gruesome sort of way. Sansa was a bit young for Domeric, but that meant they would have at least four years to get properly acquainted before they wed. Lord Eddard had never trusted Roose Bolton, but sons weren’t always the shadow of their fathers.

“Vayon has agreed to let Jeyne go with her as her lady-in-waiting,” Lord Eddard said, “and Jory is being sent to guard her. Hallis will be taking his place as captain of the household guard.”

Jon flicked his gaze to the tears and snot dried on the front of Robb’s doublet and stifled a smile; his sister never did anything by half measures. “What do we do now?” he asked the only father they had ever known. “If this is true, you’ve committed treason to protect us. What do you want us to do, now that we know who we are?”

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” Lord Eddard said, “you have to decide for yourselves now that you know the truth. Robert has been as much a brother to me as your Uncle Benjen is and your Uncle Brandon ever was, but that doesn’t make him a good king. Jon Arryn, your namesake, sits on the Iron Throne more often than Robert does. When he dies, the realm will descend into chaos. If you want to press your claim, the North will follow you.”

Jon shook his head and sucked in a shuddering breath. “I don’t _want_ to be king,” he rasped. “I’ve only ever wanted to be a Stark.”

Lady Catelyn spoke up and shocked him when she said, “Maybe legitimizing them is the best way to protect them. Robb would of course be named your heir with his brothers in line before Jon, but Winterfell isn’t the only castle in the North. There are others that only need rebuilding, and we have stonemasons and carpenters enough to restore Moat Cailin or any of the ancient strongholds on Sea Dragon Point to their former glory. Aly could have a keep of her own and a dowry.”

Aly looked at Jon with her eyebrows arched so high they were almost perched at her hairline. Lady Catelyn seemed to hate them less now that she knew her husband had never actually been unfaithful to her. Jon felt another rush of that strange retrospective grief, the mourning of what might’ve been if they had always known what they knew now. Then it occurred to him that all she had ever wanted from her husband was for him to send them away. If they were both legitimized and Robb was definitively named heir to Winterfell, she would get everything she wished for: a potential threat to her children and their rightful place in the line of succession lawfully eliminated and them out of sight, out of mind. Lord Eddard bestowing the Stark name upon them and feeding the gossip mill in doing so was a sacrifice Lady Catelyn was clearly willing to make.

“It would need to be large enough for three big dragons,” Aly muttered, “but at least now I understand why I was able to hatch them.”

Robb and Lady Catelyn both gaped at her. Jon stared at her with his dark grey eyes gone wide in disbelief. Lord Eddard froze.

“_What?_”

* * *

Prince Jacaerys Velaryon flew north on dragonback to negotiate with Jeyne Arryn, the Maiden of the Vale and Wardeness of the East, Lord Desmond Manderly, and Lord Cregan Stark on behalf of his mother Rhaenyra Targaryen, known as the Half-Year Queen, at the beginning of the Dance of the Dragons in 129 AC. Lord Cregan declared for Queen Rhaenyra and called his banners. Vermax clutched in the caverns below the crypts beneath Winterfell before the prince flew south and they both died at the Battle of the Gullet in 130 AC.

Those caverns were subterranean enough to keep them from being frozen or fossilizing even after centuries underground. So the eggs became dormant, until a skinchanger with the blood of the dragon found them. Aly hadn’t _known_ she was the blood of the dragon, but the old deep magic she awoke when she tripped over the clutch and stubbed her big toe on the blue and silver egg that hatched into Frostfyre didn’t care.

It took a year for dragons to grow big enough for a human to ride on dragonback, but dragons grew bigger with every passing year and they didn’t stop growing unless someone was keeping them in captivity. When construction of the Dragonpit was completed in 55 AC, that was the beginning of the end for dragons in Westeros. It was destroyed in 130 AC during the Dance of the Dragons, but the damage was done. After the death of the last dragon in 153 AC, the magic in Westeros had burnt out. Maester Luwin told her that Valyria had been the last ember of magic in the world, and Valyria was gone.

Aly held a lantern in one hand as she descended the spiral stone stairs into the caverns with Jon a few steps behind her, Robb a few steps behind her twin and Lord Eddard close behind him.

There was magic in the world. Aly couldn’t harness such power, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t _feel_ it. There was magic in the godswood, in the earth beneath her feet, in the eggs she couldn’t hatch. _Maester Luwin couldn’t be more wrong_, she thought, _magic is not a flame that can be snuffed out. It’s everywhere: in the trees, in the wind and the sky, in the rivers and the sea, in the fire and the ice, in the blood. We slaughtered the Children of the Forest, but magic is still here. We kill skinchangers on sight, but magic is still here. We slayed all of the dragons in Westeros, but magic is still here_.

* * *

Jon wasn’t afraid of the dark, though he knew his sister thought he was; he feared what might be lurking in the shadows, not darkness itself. Many a summer afternoon had been spent in the crypts with his sisters and brothers playing as the Kings of Winter sat watching over them with sightless eyes, their forebears buried in tombs beneath and behind statues carved in their likenesses sitting on thrones with stone wolves at their feet and iron swords rusted across their laps. Jon Stark had been the King in the North who built the Wolf’s Den. If only he weren’t born on the wrong side of the blanket, Jon thought, he would have the name of a king. Now he knew he wasn’t born on the wrong side of the blanket, and he did have the name of a king. It just wasn’t the name he wanted. Targaryen, not Stark. It sounded wrong in his head: _Prince Jon Targaryen_.

Lord Eddard had named him after Jon Arryn. If the father he never knew had survived the Battle of the Trident, what might Rhaegar have named his second son? Aemon, perhaps, after the Dragonknight. Or maybe Jaehaerys. Aegon had been his firstborn, so not that. Rhaegar might have named his sister Visenya, since his other daughter was named Rhaenys. Or she might have still been named Aly, but after Good Queen Alysanne instead of Black Aly. If his mother had lived, would Lyanna have wanted to name him after Jon Stark? Or would she have named him and his sister Rickard and Branda, after her father and brother who died at the hands of the Mad King?

It did no good to dwell on what might’ve been. Prince Jon Targaryen had never existed. Jon Snow did. This changed everything, and nothing. In the eyes of the world, he was still a bastard. Whether he wanted to be or not. Prince Daeron and Prince Jaehaerys were murdered by Lannister soldiers, their bodies wrapped in cloaks of crimson and gold. Princess Rhaenys was betrothed to Prince Joffrey, while Prince Aegon had been forced to take the black when he was still in swaddling clothes. Prince Viserys and Princess Daenerys were assassinated, their severed heads displayed at court during a macabre celebratory feast. If they hadn’t been raised as bastards, they would be just as dead.

Aly needn’t have bothered with the lantern. When she reached the entrance to the caverns, dragonfire lit up the underground void. Frostfyre almost knocked her over as the dragon bent her head to nuzzle her belly, heat puffing out of her nostrils and warming Aly from the outside in. Steelsong moved sinuously to stand in front of Jon, and bent his head until they stared at each other eye to eye. Proudwing was more aloof, hissing softly and querulously as Robb and Lord Eddard stepped into the mouth of the cave. Aly stroked the fringe of scales underneath her chin and stared at Proudwing sternly as Frostfyre made a fluttering noise that sounded like a cat’s purr.

Steelsong bent his head to Jon as dragons always did when choosing a rider, sparks floating up from his nostrils. Jon gaped because he knew what that meant. In the illustrations from the books on House Targaryen he’d read, particularly _Sons of the Dragon_ and _Bastard Born_, the dragons were always depicted in flight or being mounted by a rider.

Aly swallowed hard as guilt roiled in her stomach, mingling with the overwhelming jumble of emotions tangled up inside of her chest and clawing at her throat. “These are my brothers,” she murmured, “and my…” she frowned before she articulated, “…my father. Do them no harm.”

“What are their names?” Lord Eddard asked in a hushed whisper as Proudwing snorted out a scoff accompanied by plumes of smoke and peered at him with golden eyes.

“Frostfyre,” Aly said as she used one hand to cosset her dragon with scritches and used her other hand gestured to each of the other two, “Steelsong and Proudwing.”

Jon watched as Proudwing went to crouch above the other eggs protectively, his molten eyes glinting in the firelight. Then he held out a tentative hand and smiled as Steelsong closed his eyes and permitted him to scritch the scales under his chin. “Why didn’t you tell me about them?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

“How were you able to keep three dragons a secret?” Robb asked incredulously before Aly could answer Jon.

“It was easier when they were small,” Aly muttered, “they stayed underground in the crypts and they ate rats and I snuck them chickens or wild rabbits whenever I could. After they got bigger, they had to learn to fly and how to hunt their own food at night when no one would see them. I made certain they knew that humans weren’t acceptable prey and sent what coin I could to anyone whose livestock they stole, but they’re not pets and they weren’t meant to live in chains. Or cages like the Dragonpit. I worried they might be caged or slain if I told anyone they existed,” she turned and looked at Jon over the defensive hunch of her shoulder with a hangdog expression on her face. “I didn’t tell you because while half the stories we heard as children were about brave women and men who rode dragons, the other half of the stories we heard were above the brave warriors and knights who slayed them. When I hatched them I was only six, but I knew how Grandfather and Uncle Brandon had died. I knew how Aunt Lyanna…” her voice faltered over the word before she finished her sentence, “…died. I didn’t tell you because Father’s bannermen have no love for dragons and because two cannot keep a secret. Unless one of them is dead.”

“No secrets can be kept in a castle keep,” Jon said, the snarl of anger that had rankled in his gut and puffed up into his chest deflating as Steelsong hunched to breathe a puff of warmth over his face. While he never seemed to fit in with their half-siblings, and neither had Arya, his twin had never seemed to mind as they did. It rankled that he never even noticed why Aly had made herself scarce, why she had become a lone wolf. Jon didn’t know how he had missed so much.

Lord Eddard tried and failed to stifle a smile as she jutted her chin up defiantly. “Sometimes you look just like her,” he said, and they both knew he meant her mother. “It’s the wolf blood that flows through your heart. My sister’s blood.”

_I may be the blood of the dragon_, Aly thought, _but I am a she-wolf, too_.


	11. The Harvest Feast {I}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 10: The Harvest Feast {I}
> 
> Six weeks after their wedding, Roose and Wynne travel to Winterfell to attend the biannual harvest feast.

**Let us not forget the wolf, his last rite.**   
**Let us not forget the due.**   
**These animals bode well for the new year:**   
**we will begin this again and again.**

Monica Ferrell, “Harvest”

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅠ ❧**

297 AC

_At Winterfell, the ancestral seat of House Stark, on the eastern edge of the wolfswood in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

After the Long Night was dispelled, Bran the Builder and the giants who still roamed the North back then built Winterfell at the southeastern edge of the wolfswood. It had since been destroyed and rebuilt dozens of times over the centuries, but Winterfell had endured as the Starks conquered the North and endured as they knelt so their home would not burn again. Torrhen Stark was known as the King Who Knelt, but he was also the king who had the _wisdom_ to kneel and save his kingdom from burning.

_There’s a time and place for valor_, Wynne thought and winced as the wheelhouse Roose had wheedled her into traveling in lurched over a bump in the road for what felt like the millionth time, _and it’s not when one is faced with three dragons. Even though a group of dragons is called a valor of dragons, ironically_.

Wynne had never been to Winterfell before. Lady Barbrey always declined to attend the biannual harvest feast herself and sent one-armed Lord Stout as her representative instead, an insult thinly veiled by courtesy. There were two annual harvest feasts every year: one in the month of the Crow Moon, the third moon of the year, another in the month of the Corn Moon, the ninth moon of the year, ten days after Roose’s nameday. Cregard had wanted to meet his Stark cousins, but their mother would never allow him to attend the feast. Mel had accompanied Lady Mormont every year, their mother’s wroth be damned. Although she was the youngest of her siblings, Wynne had often dealt with quarrels that arose between her siblings and their lady mother as the peacemaker. Mel lived far enough away for their quarrels to remain infrequent, but Cregard made things worse by resembling his dead father in temperament as well as looks. Brandon Stark had been hotblooded, a trait the Starks attributed to their “wolf blood,” and Cregard was his son.

Domeric had attended the harvest feast as his father’s representative ever since he returned from the Redfort. Ser Rodrik Cassel, the master-at-arms at Winterfell, had been knighted at fifteen after he fought in the War of the Ninepenny Kings alongside Wynne’s great-granduncle Warren. Domeric would have envied Robb Stark, Jon Snow, and Theon Greyjoy the opportunity to train at arms under his tutelage if Ser Wayland Manderly, the master-at-arms at the Dreadfort, hadn’t fought in Robert’s Rebellion even though he was only fourteen when the war had begun.

Ser Wayland had been courting Ellara for a few months now. It was a good match, and seeing her friend so happy made Wynne feel all warm and gooey. Ellara was the one who had to run after Mel when she went up trees or hid in the barrows that weren’t too overgrown to burrow into, the one who found Cregard in the Ashwood sleeping amidst a pack of grey wolves after he shapechanged into a wolf and went missing for a week, the one who slept beside Wynne and soothed her nightmares after she returned from the Isle of Faces with the history of the world bursting at the seams of her skull. If anyone deserved wooing, it was Ellara Stout.

Roose had ridden in the wheelhouse too, at least; he was idly stroking her hair and letting her lean against him with her head on his shoulder while she knitted the heel of a sock to match the one she knitted that morning, the clattering sound of her needles soothing her frazzled nerves somewhat. It was impossible to read or fall asleep with the wheels galumphing over the earth like some kind of lumbering beast, and they couldn’t even attempt to have sex because her ladies were seated on the other side of the wheelhouse. Wynne had never felt more like a caged animal in her life. Domeric, of course, had chosen to ride his palfrey over being ensconced in the wheelhouse like a sensible man. Which only made this whole experience worse, because she missed her sorrel. Hellebore wasn’t Silverwing, but she was a good horse and Wynne had loved her from the moment her grandmother had offered her a new foal.

Penthea Waterman and Kenna Holt weren’t so bad, despite her discomfort. Kenna was the eldest daughter of Lord Peredur Holt of the Holt Tower that watched over the mouth of the Weeping Water and the niece of Ser Erskine Holt, castellan of the Dreadfort. Thea was the eldest daughter of Lord Bertram Waterman, Roose’s steward, and Lady Mifanwy Waterman, who ruled a small holdfast known as Ethering as lady regnant. Kenna was nineteen and half Ryswell with hair like burnished umber, wide brown eyes and warm ivory skin, while seventeen-year-old Thea had the dark skin with red undertones of the First Men, glossy black hair and umbrageous brown eyes so dark they were almost black. Thea was quiet, with a face to which expression didn’t come easily; her manner was mild despite the sharpness of her eyes, so her taciturn nature was more a matter of choice than something brought about by gloominess or even shyness. Kenna, contrariwise, was quick to laugh and quicker to smile, a consummate flirt who spent most of her time courting, riding, hunting and hawking. Neither of them seemed terribly afraid of her, and they didn’t gossip about her behind her back as she feared they might. It helped that she didn’t expect them to dress her or bathe her or wait on her hand and foot. Thea borrowed tomes from her extensive library and Kenna had asked to learn how to throw knives. Elsewise, she left them to their own devices. After all, it wasn’t as though she needed to be in the same room with her ladies to see what they were doing.

Roose frightened the daughters of his vassals, but that wasn’t surprising. A dozen wildlings that snuck over the Wall had avoided the Kingsroad and stumbled into Bolton lands, raiding and raping on their way south. Roose hunted them all down and imprisoned them in the bowels of the Dreadfort, where no one would hear their screams.

Wynne thought about shutting her eyes—all three of them—but instead she descended into the darkness and watched her husband peel their skin off, watched his hands turn red with blood. It was morbidly fascinating, even though she knew from past experience that no form of torture was a reliable method of interrogation. When you inflict enough pain, your victim will say anything you want to make it stop. If you only use torture, the information you extract will be tainted by screams and lies. Roose seemed aware of this, since he left his victims hooded while he was flaying them and Domeric asked the questions instead of him so they would not recognize his voice. Then he walked out of the bloodstained chamber and waited for an hour before he put on different shoes to alter the sound of his footsteps, removed the hoods and spoke to them in his quiet voice until he got everything he wanted and left them bare on the rack to fester. It was strange how efficiently detached he was during the flaying, as though men were nothing but meat to him. Wynne had seen worse, however. Much worse.

Since they weren’t part of the Seven Kingdoms, the free folk from beyond the Wall could be skinned with impunity. There were old maps in the Dreadfort made of human skin, ancient tomes with anthropodermic bibliopegy, and preserved skins belonging to Starks who lived and died thousands of years ago. Roose had confided that his forebears wore boots made of human skin as well as cloaks, until they realized human skin wasn’t as tough as cowhide and didn’t wear as well.

“A naked man has few secrets,” he whispered to her as they ascended the stairs and stepped out of the darkness. There was no blood on his hands, but he was still dressed in the roughspun peasant garb he wore during torture sessions. “A flayed man, none.”

Since pigs could digest human bone, the corpses of his victims were often made into slop and served to sows after their heads were shaved and their indigestible teeth were pulled. Lactating sows could eat fourteen pounds of feed in one sitting, and fourteen sows could dispose of a body in two hours or less. House Bolton had used swine in this capacity for centuries.

_Let us hope the Others don’t start reanimating dead feral hogs_, Wynne thought, _undead mammoths and giants are formidable enough_.

* * *

Wynne had watched him flay a dozen men alive, and his wife hadn’t so much as flinched. Nor did she avert her eyes.

Locke had brought him a dozen wildlings: ten men and a pair of spearwives. Four of the men had said they were Hornfoots, two from each clan. There had been more than two clans, but no longer. Not since the white shadows came and destroyed the villages of the other six clans in one night. Four of them called themselves Nightrunners, while the ones who took the longest to break said they were Thenns. Hornfoots and Nightrunners were bitter enemies for centuries before the so-called King beyond the Wall made peace between them.

Mance Rayder had brought all of the wildlings to heel under one banner. Then he sent these scouts to ascertain how populous the North was, and they had crossed the Last River to raid the farming and fishing villages south of the Lonely Hills.

Bolton lands were quiet and peaceful lands. Roose had gone to great lengths to make certain of that. Most of his smallfolk were millers, smiths, farmers, miners, or fishermen. Because his lands were arable, his domain was more populous than mountainous or sylvan territories. There were no castles in his domain besides the Dreadfort, so the landscape was spattered with holdfasts and cottages and farmhouses and orchards and fields used for growing crops or grazing livestock.

There was nowhere for wildlings to hide once they emerged from the wild ribbon of forest that marked the border of Umber and Bolton lands.

Roose had been flaying the chest of a wildling man strapped to a saltire, one whose feet were hard and black from years of going without shoes and walking on frozen terrain, when his wife quietly folded herself into the wooden chair unadorned by upholstery that sat with its back against the wall; he _felt_ her enter the room more than he heard her footsteps on the stone beneath her feet, his skin prickling with awareness of her pansophic gaze, his heart leaping up from where it beat in his chest into his throat and threatening to choke him until he steeled himself against his visceral physical response to her presence and swallowed it down.

Wynne sat in silence and watched him, his traitorous pulse quickening under her quiet scrutiny.

Roose had once sat in that chair when he was a child and watched his father do what he was doing now. Domeric sat in that chair and watched him after he returned from squiring at the Redfort, but that was expected. For he was a Bolton, and flaying was their family tradition. If his bastard had lived and Domeric had died, Ramsay would have had ever so much to learn from his father and he would be sitting in that chair now instead of Wynne.

Fresh red blood welled up like a string of pearls beneath his knife, the blade slicing and splitting the skin in crisscrossed wounds over and over until the precise lacerations had frayed at the edges into gaping holes and he inhaled the cruel ferrous scent of cruor with every breath.

“_You must watch_,” his own father had whispered to him decades ago, “_watch and learn_.”

It occurred to Roose that “watch and learn” was the essence of greenseers. This was his wife acting in accordance with her true nature: sharp of mind and keen of eye. If she had chosen to watch him with her panoptic third eye, he would be none the wiser.

Wynne frequently seemed much older than she truly was, although he supposed that was a natural consequence of retroactively seeing all of history as only a girl of eight. Nothing ever shocked her because the brutality of humanity was _predictable _to one such as she. Wynne knew what sort of man he was, and she had married him nonetheless; her sagacity was an odd contrast with her shyness, how copiously she blushed and how she anxiously bit her lip.

Roose wondered idly whether she would balk at the blood still fresh and so warm on his hands, if seeing him strip the flesh and secrets from these men would make her afraid of him…and for the first time, his blade wavered before the sharp edge bit into the skin.

Wynne didn’t balk later that night when he bound her arms behind her back with a silk cord and ordered her to sit astride him, nor when he teased her nipples with teeth and tongue until her face and neck and pale breasts were flushed, nor when he fucked her slowly with his fingers and told her to lick and suck them clean once she came all over his hand, nor when he bit down on the pulse in her neck and slipped one of his fingers into her as yet unclaimed ass while his cock was deep inside of her sweet wet cunt; she only whimpered and moaned and shuddered in his arms, begging for more as she rode him at the punishingly slow and rough pace he set.

No matter how many times he fucked her into submission to assert his dominance over her and his _ownership_ of her, he still felt powerless in his desire. Roose knew his need for her was rooted too deep to ever be leeched out of him. It would be simple to cut her out of his life. Roose imagined slicing her soft throat and feeling the red hot spray of her arterial blood on his skin as the light in her eyes faded, as her fluttering heart ceased to beat. Alas, the moment he thought of that, an excruciating twist in his stomach violently and viscerally rejected the prospect of ever doing such a thing. Roose had no desire to harm her. So instead he stroked her vermeil hair and let her fall asleep with her head on his chest, dreaming her nightmarish green dreams.

* * *

When the wheelhouse rolled through the East Gate of Winterfell, her stomach roiled and Wynne had to slap one of her hands over her mouth to muffle the nauseated groan that coiled in her throat.

It had been six weeks since her wedding and eight weeks since her last moonblood. Wynne had thought she might be pregnant when her moonblood didn’t come a fortnight after her wedding, and a sennight of dreams in which a pair of leeches tinted pink and bloated with blood curled up inside her belly had all but confirmed her suspicions.

At least this prophetic metaphor wasn’t the worst.

If the gods had sent her dreams of a flayed baby instead, she might have woken up screaming and never stopped.

Roose put his hand on her shoulder to get her attention once she dropped her knitting back in the basket of yarn at her feet, his palm curled over the lambswool of her sleeve as his fingertips dug into her upper arm gently. “My lady,” he whispered, “are you well?”

Wynne groaned again into the hollow of her palm and reached out to squeeze the fingers of his other hand reassuringly. It was much too soon for a maester to confirm her pregnancy, so Roose didn’t know yet. There was a higher risk of miscarriage during the first trimester and she was only six weeks pregnant at most. If she miscarried before her pregnancy was even confirmed, he would be disappointed. Wynne didn’t want to disappoint the man she… “I have the most hypersensitive stomach in the Seven Kingdoms,” she deadpanned.

Roose chuckled softly. “I’m sure you carrying my child has only exacerbated that,” he said blithely.

Wynne blinked at him with her eyes gone wide behind her eyeglasses, her mouth gaping open beneath her palm. “How…?” she blurted out.

Roose scoffed even as his mouth curled into a faint sliver of a smile, one with a sharp edge of male smugness. “You haven’t bled since before our wedding. You’ve crept out of bed every morning to vomit for over a week now,” he whispered. “You cannot abide the smell of cooked meat at table. Your headaches are more frequent. You’re exhausted at the end of the day, even if the day was uneventful. Your breasts are more sensitive than before. I may not possess your powers of perception, but I pay close attention to you.”

Wynne blushed as Ellara reached across the confines of the wheelhouse to squeeze her knee through her skirts, beaming. “Let me be the first of many to offer my most heartfelt congratulations to my lord and lady,” she proclaimed with palpable pride permeating her cordial tone.

Kenna and Thea politely echoed the felicitous courtesy as Phineas Holt, a page in service at the Dreadfort, opened the door of the wheelhouse. Roose stepped out into the afternoon sun, the light slashing a warm sheen into his hair and illuminating threads of silver in the beard he had grown on the road as he offered his hand to her; he stroked the back of her hand gently with his thumb when she grasped his fingers and splayed his other hand possessively over the small of her back as she emerged. Wynne breathed in the fresh air as profusely as propriety allowed in the hopes that it would mitigate her nausea.

Alas, it did no such thing.

Winterfell rose all around her, towering over her: the Great Keep looming to her left, the stalwart gatehouse and crumbling drum tower of the First Keep guarded by gargoyles whose hunched stone bodies had been rendered worn and shapeless by the passage of time lurking to her left. Bran the Builder hadn’t leveled the land before he built the walls, and neither had those who built and rebuilt the structures within over the centuries. There were hills and valleys behind the walls of Winterfell, though each of the four courtyards had long since been leveled into a smooth floor of packed dirt by footsteps and paws and hoofbeats in every direction. At the heart of Winterfell, a weirwood stood over a pool of dark water in a grove of ancient chestnut, elm, hawthorn, ash, ironwood, oak, sentinel and soldier pine trees. Wynne felt it watching her, even though her third eye wasn’t open; she kept it shut to avoid seeing posthumous shades of the past superimposed over the present. If she hadn’t perfected her control of her powers, she would see ghosts everywhere she went.

Catelyn stood in the bustling courtyard as servants came and went: men in the livery of House Dustin, House Ryswell, and House Manderly were unloading wayns from Barrowton, the Rills, and White Harbor brimming with foodstuffs, and Dreadfort men began unloading the wayns they had brought, with casks full of fish and crates of fruit and vegetables. Since the harvest feast was in fact three days of feasting as the moon waxed full and then waned, the principal bannermen of the North offered up what food they could as a show of both fealty and wealth. Ser Wayland and Domeric had dismounted from their horses and helped her ladies out of the wheelhouse as grooms led their mounts to the stables. Domeric gave the hunch of her shoulder a discreet squeeze before he went to oversee the stabling of his palfrey. “Lord and Lady Bolton,” Catelyn said. “Welcome to Winterfell.”

“Lady Catelyn,” Roose said in a solicitous voice a wisp above a whisper, “it’s a pleasure to look on you again.”

Catelyn wore a white samite gown with a high collar embroidered with the leaping silver trout of House Tully embordered with dark blue and mud red thread and trimmed with grey vair, her skirts a confection of light and dark shades of grey threaded with silver and blue. Rickon, her five-year-old son, clung to her skirts and peered at them with blue eyes that matched his mother’s.

Wynne plucked a piece of maple walnut candy from one of her hidden pockets and bent to offer him the sweet. Rickon grinned at her and bit into the edge of the candy leaf. Wynne smiled back, shyly.

“Now you’ve done it,” Catelyn said fondly as her son chewed and swallowed before holding out his hand for another, “he’ll beg you for sweets every chance he gets _and_ he’ll cry when you leave.”

Wynne shrugged, her thick ocherous braid slithering over the bend of her back. “No more or you’ll spoil your dinner,” she told him sternly before she bent further to whisper conspiratorially, “but after dinner…”

Rickon grinned wider and ran off, getting underfoot as he went and leaving men stumbling and spinning to avoid dropping casks in his wake.

Wynne straightened her spine and turned back to Catelyn. “Lady Stark,” she murmured. “There are matters I would discuss with your lord husband.”

Catelyn nodded solemnly, all traces of her fond smile withering from her face. “Yes,” she said gravely. “I thought you might.”

Robb met them at the entrance to the Great Keep. Wynne had seen him at her wedding, and in her periphery with her third eye: he was tall and broad, with blue eyes and thick auburn hair tinged a darker shade than his mother’s. Robb grasped her hand and kissed it perfunctorily. “My lady,” he greeted her with a smile but without embellishment or flattery.

Wynne fought the urge to roll her eyes as Roose smoothed his hand over from the small of her back to the curve of her waist, his grip proprietary and bordering on improper. Robb hadn’t lingered or flirted with her; he was only touching her because propriety dictated that he kiss her knuckles. “My lord,” she echoed, affording him a title out of courtesy even though he was not yet a lord in truth.

“How fares your sister?” Roose murmured, his quiet tone a thin veneer of cordiality that concealed ice so cold it burned.

Robb did not ask which sister he meant. “Sansa is afraid to sleep,” he said as they climbed the spiraling tower staircase of the Great Keep. “Maester Luwin has been giving her dreamwine.”

Wynne huffed. “Painkillers won’t stop her from skinchanging,” she snapped, “you cannot drug her magic out of her. There is skinchanging in your bloodline, in the marrow of your bones. When the Moon King’s sons raped the Warg King’s daughters, her fate was sealed…as was yours. Unless you’ve never dreamed of running with a pack in the wolfswood. Or woken up with the aftertaste of blood hot in your mouth, seeing too many colors and feeling as though your teeth should be sharper. Canids see only in yellows, blues, and greys. Have you ever looked at the world through a wolf’s eyes?”

Robb didn’t answer her question; he did not have to, because the stricken expression that fell over his face spoke for itself. “How do birds see the world?” he asked her instead.

“Their perception is rendered in more and brighter colors than humans are capable of comprehending without skinchanging,” Wynne said wistfully. “When you see the world through a bird’s eyes, everything looks so beautiful it _hurts_. How do you go back to being human after that?”

Silence ensued and hung over them on the air, heavy enough to stick like thorns in her throat. It left her question unanswered as they turned and reached the very top of the tower. Roose seemed calm as ever and his expression betrayed nothing, but his fingertips digging into the dip of her waist hard enough to bruise told her that he didn’t want her to slip out of her skin and fly away.

_I’m not going anywhere_, Wynne thought, but didn’t say aloud. Bloodraven was enough of a cautionary tale to dissuade her from lingering in the minds of birds, lest she become like him: trapped in the roots of a weirwood tree and only seeing the world through corvid eyes. There were children growing inside of her, and that primal fact had destroyed all of the magically induced detachment she felt towards her body.

Eddard stood behind the roughhewn table made of plank and trestle in his solar instead of sitting in his great oak chair with the grey velvet cushions; the ancestral Valyrian steel greatsword Ice hung on the stone wall behind him with the blade obscured by its scabbard, the sword itself lying in wait rather than on display. Wynne curtsied to her liege. Eddard acknowledged her deference with a nod before he offered two letters to her: one stamped with the seal of House Baratheon in gold mixed with obsidian ground so fine it sparkled without changing the color of the wax and another tied only with a bloodred ribbon. “Lord Stannis has sent us a reply,” he said. “These were enclosed, addressed to you.”

Wynne tucked the scrolls of parchment into one of her hidden pockets unopened and swept her skirts beneath her as she took a seat in the chair on the other side of the table. “How much does your son know?” she asked him.

“I can speak for myself,” Robb answered.

Wynne turned and looked at him over her shoulder, pinning him with the quirk of her eyebrow. “How much do you know?” she echoed.

Robb swallowed hard. “I know you’re a greenseer,” he said, “and one day I’ll be your liege. If you’re thinking about the future, you should be speaking to me as well as to my father.”

Wynne smiled acerbically, and Robb flinched. It was more instinct than anything else, his body reacting subconsciously to the implicit threat of her before his conscious mind understood that she could be something to fear. Roose smiled faintly before he smoothed all facets of emotion out of his expression and put his hand on her knee underneath the trestle table; his touch was muted by her skirts, but it was still enough to soothe the frazzled nerves concealed behind the mordant curl of her lips. “My best hunter found a dozen wildlings on Bolton lands,” he said. “When I questioned them, they said that Mance Rayder had sent them over the Wall to scout and report on the populousness of the North.”

“You flayed them,” Eddard said.

Roose cocked his head in concession. “Your forebears outlawed flaying the denizens of the North,” he said mildly, “the law was amended to include all citizens of the Seven Kingdoms after Torrhen Stark bent the knee to Aegon the Conqueror. However, wildlings do not belong to the Seven Kingdoms. That makes them fair game.”

“Mance Rayder would only send over scouts if he’s planning to invade,” Robb deduced.

Roose smiled again, wide enough to bare his teeth. “No,” he said. “Mance Rayder is marching on the Wall because the wildlings are fleeing the Others and their army of wights.”

Catelyn stifled a fearful gasp, but could not stifle the shudder that gripped her spine with cold fingers. Eddard saw the dread on her face and shook his head. “There are no Others,” he said, “they’ve been gone eight thousand years. Maesters say they never existed at all. No living man has ever seen one.”

Wynne tilted her head and looked him in the eye, unflinching. “I have,” she told him.


	12. The Harvest Feast {II}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 11: The Harvest Feast {II}
> 
> After they’ve sown the seeds of the impending War for the Dawn, Roose attempts to earn his wife’s trust.

**I trust you the way I’d trust a trick of the eye:**   
**nothing disproven without touch or taste, without**   
**the heat of hands or a mouth. There were years**   
**in which the only touch I did not shy away from**   
**left me with someone else’s skin torn away.**

Quinn Lui, “Meatshop in Winter”

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅠⅠ ❧**

297 AC

_At Winterfell, the ancestral seat of House Stark, on the eastern edge of the wolfswood in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

Lord and Lady Stark were frightened. Fear was for the winter, and soon the seasons would change. Robb swallowed hard and squared his shoulders as if to shake the dread off.

“Torrhen Stark bent the knee to Aegon the Conqueror because his wife—and your namesake—was a greenseer,” Wynne informed them. “Queen Eddara foresaw that dragons would be needed to stop the long night that never ends from ever coming to pass.”

Robb frowned. “Our ancestors didn’t have dragons,” he pointed out, “they still won the Battle for the Dawn.”

“Our forebears had the Children of the Forest on their side,” Roose said mildly. “It was _your_ ancestors who slaughtered them after the Andals invaded Westeros and the last King of Winter broke the Pact of the Isle of Faces.”

Wynne flicked her gaze to Eddard. “Our indigenous magic has waned,” she murmured, “the Children of the Forest are as good as extinct. We need dragons to win the War for the Dawn because the First Men and the Andals came and pulled the magic of Westeros out by the roots. Men forget, but trees remember. _I_ remember the Battle for the Dawn. I remember every burning weirwood, every blade and every arrow that felled the Children of the Forest. I remember the Hammer of the Waters that broke the Arm of Dorne and embogged the Neck. I remember the Warg King’s daughters, the Marsh Princess who became Queen in the North because her husband murdered her father, the Barrow Princess who became a Queen of Winter to bring an end to the Thousand Years War between my family and yours. I remember every warg and skinchanger who ever walked the earth, and far too many of them have been hunted and hanged because people fear what they do not understand. All of your children are skinchangers,” she said. “My brother is a warg. Our magic is rising again because the Others have returned, and we need magic if we’re going to win the War for the Dawn.”

“Others are magic,” Catelyn said. “We have to fight magic with magic.”

Wynne nodded succinctly, happy they’d moved past the debate about whether the Others existed or not. Eddard was still attempting to wrap his head around it, but Catelyn seemed more adaptable. Women always were.

“We need to warn the Night’s Watch,” Eddard said. “My brother is First Ranger. He has the Lord Commander’s ear.”

Wynne tugged her bottom lip in between her teeth. “Once the Night’s Watch numbered ten thousand strong,” she said, “and they had nineteen castles to guard the Wall. Now they have three castles and nine hundred two-and-forty men: six hundred at Castle Black, two hundred at the Shadow Tower, and a hundred two-and-forty at Eastwatch.”

“Most of them are peasants who never trained at arms before they chose to take the black,” Roose said. “How will they fare against an army of wights? There will be more deserters from the Night’s Watch before the year is out, I fear.”

“Benjen and I have discussed resettling the Gift with Lord Commander Mormont before,” Eddard said. “If Mance Rayder is marching on the Wall to escape from the Others and their army of the dead, not to start a war, then we might be able to negotiate with him to let wildling refugee families live in the Gift and work the land while the men and spearwives garrison the abandoned castles.”

“Nothing is that simple,” Catelyn said dubiously.

Wynne heaved a sigh. “It would be less costly than hiring sellswords to regarrison the castles,” she murmured, “but thousands of years of enmity between the wildlings and northmen won’t conveniently vanish just because we have a common enemy.”

“The enemy of our enemy is our friend,” Robb quoted. “Joramun and Brandon the Breaker formed an alliance to defeat the Night’s King.”

Wynne sighed again. “Brandon the Breaker was a King of Winter,” she pointed out, “he ruled before your family conquered the North and he wasn’t asking his lords bannermen to make peace with the men who have raided and raped their lands and people for generations. There are those who might say that is too much to ask.”

* * *

When he was a boy of three, his mother had brought him to Barrow Hall and he had stood outside the birthing room while his aunt brought his cousin into the world. Wynne had been an ugly little girl born with a head of red-gold curls, her face squishy and pink as she wailed like some fell beast that had crawled out of a cairn to harry the living. When his mother put that screaming baby in his arms, only courtesy kept him from dropping her. Until she abruptly stopped crying and nuzzled her nose against his chest. From then on, he loved her like she was the sister he never had.

Domeric had remained at Barrow Hall for almost a year while his lady mother doted on her niece and he watched as Wynne learned to crawl, to eat, to speak. Three years later he returned to Barrow Hall as a page, and she had learned her letters when he wasn’t looking. Domeric took her riding whenever he could escape his duties and read her a bedtime story every night. When he was elsewhere, she read by herself or played with her sister and Ellara. Ser Addam Dustin, her father’s cousin, had begun teaching her to wield an axe as soon as she could walk.

Cregard had been sent into fosterage with his uncle in the Rills the year Domeric had begun training as a page, and Mel was sent to Bear Island a year later. Wynne remained with their lady mother, who loved her children but had grown so bitter that her daughter felt uncomfortable and sometimes unwanted in her presence. Barbrey had dreamed of being the Lady of Winterfell, but she became the widow of Barrowton instead. Unable to remarry, lest she lose her lands and titles and put her daughter in danger of being usurped or forced into marriage by her hypothetical husband. If she had gotten everything she ever wanted, her daughter would not exist. Wynne had been a girl of seven when she told Domeric this in a voice devoid of emotion, one corner of her mouth unfurled in a rueful smile that broke his heart.

Three moons later, his mother died of summer fever and it felt as though her death had cast a bleak shadow that hung over the world like a pall. Domeric had returned to the Dreadfort to bury his mother with his brothers in the crypts beneath the castle. After the funeral, Wynne had been sent into fosterage with her grandmother at Raventree Hall. When she wrote to him, she told him about the Isle of Faces: the ancient weirwood grove with a face carved into the bone white bark of each heart tree, the Green Men with their antlers who spoke the True Tongue and taught her to speak the harsh Old Tongue of the First Men, the glimmering water of the Gods Eye graced by giant black swans who mated for life and busked ferociously at those who posed a threat to their offspring, the ruinous castle of Harrenhal on the opposing shore with its five great towers splitting the firmament above. After his lord father sent a raven informing him that he was to squire with his uncle Ser Horton, the Lord of the Redfort, Domeric had all but ordered Addam to protect Wynne in his absence.

_D_, her letters said,

_Harrenhal is the best place to hone my greensight. I look at the castle, and I see everything that is happening inside and outside in only an eyeblink. It’s the difference between not knowing how to read and staring at the incomprehensible words on the page in bewilderment and knowing precisely what every word means. I am reading the world like a book._

_I cannot keep my third eye open. Else I would see every horror in the realm and hate myself for being unable to save everyone. I wonder if this is how gods feel when they fail to answer our prayers._

_Lord Tytos has sent my cousin Brynden to squire at Harrenhal, and he brings me paper and ink and fresh clothes from the castle and sweets and trifles from the shops in Lord Harroway’s Town_. _I cross the lake every day to lunch with Brynden and sweet old Lady Shella, whose husband and sons all died in either Robert’s Rebellion or the Greyjoy Rebellion and whose daughter lives at the Twins with her husband._

_I have seen what is beyond the Wall. Bloodraven visits me in my dreams most nights, appearing to me as a three-eyed crow who speaks with his voice. I am more afraid than I have ever been._

_Silverwing doesn’t get along with the swans, but she has taken to swimming in the shallow water of the Gods Eye._

_I miss you._

_W_

Queenscrown was the beginning of the end. Domeric could only watch as the wildlings fought over his ugly little girl, as their leader pinned her down and tore her skirts. Wynne had gritted her teeth, her nostrils flared, and then his world had gone black.

When he awoke, she had collapsed in the center of a gruesome circle of mutilated corpses with blood staining her hands and tears staining her face. Addam and the Smalljon found them and brought them to the Last Hearth, where she remained unconscious for two days. Domeric vigilantly sat by her bedside until she woke up and smiled at him.

Addam died the year Wynne turned fifteen, and that brought the suitors from all over the North to Barrowton like a flock of carrion birds. Domeric knew his ugly little girl had grown into a beautiful woman—he wasn’t _blind_—but he had changed her diapers one fateful afternoon when her nursemaid had been too sick to look after her. Therefore, it was impossible for him to see her as a woman. Domeric had told his foster brothers about her because they reminded him of Addam, and because he loved them. Wynne choosing his lord father over any of her other prospects was _beyond the pale_.

Domeric had avoided Wynne in the aftermath of the wedding out of courtesy. Now that his cousin was a married woman, he didn’t know how to approach her without sparking rumors that he was cuckolding his father. Domeric still kept an eye on her, and he knew his father wasn’t mistreating her; he went hunting with her, he heard petitions with her, he took all of his meals with her, and he actually made her laugh, even though his sense of humor was as dark and cold as one might expect. It stung that she didn’t need him to protect her anymore, but then she never did. Wynne had protected _him_ from the wildlings that would have gutted him where he stood and raped her, and she was terribly capable of protecting herself.

When his lord father told him that he was betrothed to Lady Sansa Stark, Domeric was surprised. Although not unpleasantly so.

Sansa had written to Wynne in the aftermath of the wedding. It was a frivolous letter, full of compliments on her gown and questions about stitching and embroidery and styles of sleeves. Wynne hadn’t needed greensight to see that Sansa was scared out of her mind and she was clinging to ladylike trifles in order to delude herself into believing that nothing had changed. As though her fear of the unknown could be conquered with finery.

Domeric knew Wynne had done the same once upon a time, wielding her femininity like one more weapon in her arsenal. Courtesy was a lady’s armor, and trifles were their shields. Words, their swords.

Sometimes a sharp tongue was a more effective weapon than a blade, and knowing when to hold her tongue had kept her alive.

Domeric knew the match between them was made because Sansa was a skinchanger. It was something that wouldn’t affect her prospects, because she was the eldest daughter of the Warden of the North, a granddaughter of the Lord Paramount of the Trident, and a niece of the Warden of the East, but _would _affect the way her lord and master treated her once they were married. Domeric would sooner cut his own throat into a grotesque red smile from ear to ear than mistreat her.

Although he couldn’t pinpoint the moment he realized his parents weren’t in love, the realization hadn’t been devastating. For them, marriage was duty. It was about marrying the right sort of woman, one with the right sort of pedigree, and carrying on their ancient and most noble bloodline. There was no one in the North with better pedigree than Sansa, and he wouldn’t be expected to take her as his bride for years. Four years during which they could become acquainted and perhaps truly come to care for each other as her parents did.

With that in mind, he knocked on the door of her chambers. Septa Mordane, a woman of the Faith dressed in a wimple and stark white robes with a mouth so thin it seemed lipless and shrewd blue eyes that missed nothing, answered the door and curtsied to him before she let him inside.

Sansa was tall for her age, with an oval-shaped face, thick auburn hair, vibrant Tully blue eyes, fair skin and fine high cheekbones. Pretty, but so young. Too young for Domeric to look at her and see anything but a beautiful little girl. Albeit a girl he was going to marry. It was strange, looking upon the embodiment of his future.

There were pieces of dark roughspun fabric hanging over the windows of her chambers, blocking out the sky. Delicate white tallow candles were perched in tarnished silver candlesticks with flames dancing on their smoldering wicks. Three other girls sat with her in a circle of wooden couches softened by velvet cushions and surrounded by heavy wooden trunks packed with her things: her little sister Lyanna, whose hair was a darker shade of russet and whose eyes contained flecks of grey and gold in the vivid blue. Beth, the eight-year-old daughter of Winterfell’s master-at-arms, whose skin was festooned with freckles and whose hair was a riot of blonde curls tied back with a silk ribbon. Jeyne, the steward’s daughter, a skinny girl of twelve with dark hair and brown eyes.

Sansa blushed when she caught sight of him and put down her embroidery before she elegantly rose to her feet and curtsied. “My sweet lord,” she greeted him with a shy fluttering smile.

Domeric kissed her hand, gallant as ever. “My lady,” he murmured.

Lyanna scowled when he attempted to kiss her hand and kicked him in the shins. It didn’t hurt because her feet were tiny and ineffectual, but he dropped to his knees and pressed the back of his hand to his forehead with a melodramatic flourish.

“Alas!” Domeric bemoaned. “I’ve been vanquished, I fear.”

Sansa gasped and glared at her sister. “Lya, no!” she shrieked. “You’re spoiling it!”

Lyanna sniffled and scowled even harder. “You’re _my _sister,” she muttered petulantly. “You can’t leave. I won’t allow it.”

Domeric shook his head and moved into a crouch so they could see each other eye to eye. “When I was your age,” he said, “I began training as a page. I served Lady Dustin for three years before I was fostered at the Redfort. Do you know where that is?”

“In the Vale of Arryn, east of the Bloody Gate and southeast of the Eyrie,” Lyanna said imperiously, “the Redfort is the ancient seat of House Redfort. Their coat of arms is a red castle on a white field with a red embattled bolder. Their words are _As Strong as Stone_. Their lord is Ser Horton Redfort.”

“I served as his squire,” Domeric said, “his sons—Ser Jasper, Ser Creighton, Ser Jon and Mychel—are my brothers. Yet I had to leave them. I am the heir to the Dreadfort, so I cannot be a squire and enter the lists at every tourney until I earn my spurs. Your sweet sister shall be my lady and wife. I should like to know her, and for her to know me and my people, before she comes before the gods as my bride.”

“I’m going because it’s what I _want_,” Sansa informed her sister haughtily, “I want to marry Domeric and have his babies. We’ll be ever so happy, just like in the songs. Our sons will have sable hair and silver eyes and they’ll be as brave as wolves and cunning too.”

Domeric smoothed the discomfort that squiggled through his gut out of his expression. Some men found eleven-year-old girls desirable. Domeric was not one of those men. It would be his duty to have babies with her, but not for another four years at least. _Life is not a song_, he thought, to his sorrow.

* * *

Since the betrothal of Domeric and Sansa was going to be announced that night at the feast, the Boltons and their entourage were staying in the guesthouse within the walls of Winterfell. It was a manse that stood in the inner courtyard between the armory and the library tower with its staircase of stone winding around its exterior. Dreadfort men had left their belongings inside, and they had been smart enough to assume their lord and his lady would not be sleeping in separate rooms.

Roose sat in the solar of the guesthouse dressed only in his undertunic and breeches with a bowl of steaming hot water and a pot of shaving foam on a small oaken table beside him. Elsewhere, his boots were being polished by his page. Wynne sharpened a razor with a leather strop before she dipped a shaving brush into the pot and swept the foam meticulously over his face and neck. Roose leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, savoring the feel of her fingertips stroking his hair and inhaling the intoxicating delicate scent that clung to her skin. There was something very intimate about trusting her enough to expose his throat while she held a blade in one hand and scraped the acuminous edge gently over his skin. “House Karstark and House Umber will never approve of any plan Ned Stark has to resettle wildling refugees in the Gift,” he murmured, “even if the Night’s Watch agrees to give them safe passage through the Wall. Mors Crowfood won’t stand for it. Nor will the mountain clans.”

Wynne tapped his throat with the dull spine of the razor, gently warning him to keep quiet before she began shaving his neck. “I hate the wildlings too,” she informed him, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand them. We built the Wall to keep the Others from coming back and left the people who refused to bend the knee to our forebears and play by our rules on the other side to die, but they survived out of spite. Now their hatred runs eight thousand years deep. There are wildflowers and trees beyond the Wall, but wildlings are lucky if they can get one or two harvest cycles out of the land every year because of the permafrost below the earth. We get four,” she dipped a piece of undyed linen in the bowl of water and wiped the remnants of foam on his neck before she dragged the sharp razor along his jaw and said, “one every three moons. It’s either difficult or impossible for them to breed livestock, depending on what region they’re from. Which is why most of them don’t ride horses, but some do ride aurochs. Thenns mine copper and tin and make crude bronze, but wildlings don’t forge iron or steel because they don’t know how to refine it…” she dabbed at his smooth chin and cheeks with the cloth and began shaving the skin above his upper lip, “…they can only steal it. We see them as barbaric and primitive, but they are what our ancestors made of them.”

Roose smiled faintly at the sound of the water sloshing in the bowl as she rinsed her hands and swirled the shaving brush in circles until its bristles were devoid of foam clumps. When he opened his eyes, her back was to him. Roose watched her rummage through everything in her trunk and smiled wider as she bent over more, enjoying the view of her ass in the air.

Wynne had stripped out of her traveling clothes at the earliest opportunity because her gown was lambswool, and wool of any sort irritated her skin; she wore a satin chemise over her sheer silk stockings and smallclothes, her curls were spiraling out of her braid, and she was still the most exquisite thing he had ever set eyes on. Three months of courtship and six weeks of marriage hadn’t changed that. Roose doubted anything ever would, especially now that she was carrying his child.

Fathering more children wasn’t something he’d thought about much after he buried the bones of his sons in the crypts beneath the Dreadfort. Then after Bethany had died, it was the furthest thing from his mind. Domeric was his heir and he had no need of a spare, nor was he in want of a new wife.

Wynne had changed the game, and now he was eagerly anticipating the birth of their first child. Roose wanted to see her soft belly swollen with his seed, and he wondered if she would give him another son or a daughter. Twins ran in her family, so perhaps both.

“Why is Stannis Baratheon writing to you?” he asked her.

Wynne turned and looked at him over her shoulder and sucked her cheek in between her teeth anxiously. “I can’t tell you that,” she mumbled.

Roose frowned. “Why ever not?” he asked.

Wynne unbent her spine and he saw that she held a glass candle in her hand, wrapped in a strip of roughspun cotton. It wasn’t the green candle that his uncle had sent. This crude obsidian taper was black and tinted red, as if forged in blood. Willas had rediscovered the lost art of glass chandlery and ensorcelled obsidian from Dragonstone into bougies. Since he was half Hightower, Roose wasn’t surprised to learn the heir to Highgarden dabbled in sorcery.

Leyton Hightower, the Old Man of Oldtown, Lord of the Hightower, Defender of the Citadel, Lord of the Port, and Beacon of the South, was his grandfather. It was said he knew all that occurred within his labyrinthine city, even though he hadn’t deigned to descend from the Hightower in almost a decade. Leyton Hightower wasn’t a greenseer, so ostensibly he had a glass candle burning in his castle.

Wynne closed her trunk with a creak and set the glass candle on top before she turned and looked at him with her autumnal eyes narrowed behind her bronze eyeglasses. “Because you’re ambitious,” she murmured, “and ruthlessly opportunistic. I won’t allow your lust for power to ruin my plans.”

This was a game unlike any other, with the entire realm of Westeros at stake. Roose wanted her to trust him with her secrets not so he could betray her if the opportunity arose, but so he could be her ally instead of an enemy. Because he needed her, and he was playing to win. “I might be able to avoid ruining these clever plans of yours,” he said mildly, “if you told me what they are. Let me prove that I can be worthy of your trust, my lady.”

Wynne snorted derisively, not fooled by his coaxing tone for even a moment. “Lord Stannis and Lord Arryn are attempting to prove the queen has cuckolded the king and that all of her children are bastards,” she whispered, “if my interpretation of my prophetic dream is correct, Petyr Baelish and Lysa Arryn are going to murder Lord Arryn and blame the Lannisters. Lady Lysa wants to marry Lord Baelish—she’s been in love with him since they were children, but her father thought he was too lowborn for her—and he wants to incite chaos. Lord Stannis wants to put Queen Cersei on trial for treason, and he wants me to give testimony against her.”

“If Stannis Baratheon thinks a man like Tywin Lannister will allow him to accuse his daughter of treason and thereby extinguish any chance his grandchildren have of sitting the Iron Throne,” Roose whispered back, “he’s a fool.”

Wynne nodded succinctly. “Precisely,” she deadpanned. “There won’t be a trial. Lord Tywin massacred the Reynes and Tarbecks because they laughed at his father and rose in rebellion against him, and he’d sooner declare war than suffer any slight against his family. Or,” she adjusted her eyeglasses with two fingers, “he could just bankrupt the crown. Over six million golden dragons are currently owed to the Iron Bank, the Faith, House Tyrell, and House Lannister. Three million is owed to House Lannister specifically.”

“Tywin Lannister owns the crown,” Roose deduced, “bought and paid for.” It was similar to something Lord Tywin had done before, during the fleeting reign of Jaehaerys the Clever: he paid back the debt owed by the crown to the Iron Bank of Braavos in the aftermath of the War of the Ninepenny Kings with gold from Casterly Rock.

Wynne nodded again. “I hate the king,” she confessed in a bitter hush, “I can see him whoring and drinking and hunting when he should be ruling the realm and I think, _this_ is what my father and so many others died for? So that fat man can wear a crown and be a waste of space? I know we’ve had seventeen years of peace, but that isn’t because of Robert Baratheon.” Wynne said the name _Robert Baratheon _in a disgusted tone of voice that anyone else would’ve used to describe excrement on the bottom of their shoe. “It’s because of his small council, Lord Arryn and Lord Stannis in particular. Lord Renly is a puffed up peacock who cares more about frippery and frivolity than ruling—he’s our Master of Laws and he thinks books aren’t worth reading unless they’re pornographic. Lord Baelish would burn the world so that he could be king of the ashes. Lord Varys buys aglossal slave children from a magister in Pentos, they become his little birds, and he uses the information they gather to play everyone at court against each other for his own ends. Which are in opposition to mine, because he has hated all things magical since a Myrish sorcerer castrated him in order to perform a bloodmagic ritual. Pycelle has always been Lord Tywin’s creature—he was born a Lannett of Lannisport. Ser Barristan is a true knight, but honorable men are not made for politics.”

Roose smirked. _Lord Stark will learn that lesson soon enough_, he thought. “Our miners broke ground on the gold field you found,” he said. “Wars cost money, but House Bolton won’t lack for coin.”

Wynne heaved a reticent sigh. “Lord Wyman is reopening the mint in White Harbor that was used back when the North was its own sovereign nation for me,” she murmured. “I’d like to open a bank in Barrowton someday. It’s been a dream of mine since I read about Lady Sam and the Bank of Oldtown in the writings of Archmaester Abelon when I was a girl of six.”

“It would be useful to have a bank in the North,” Roose agreed. There were only five banks in all of Westeros: the Bank of Oldtown in the Reach, the Bank of Lannisport in the Westerlands, the Bank of Gulltown in the Vale, the Bank of Sunspear in the shadow city of Dorne, and Blackwater Bank in the Crownlands. All coin was minted by the Guild of Engravers, with an officer appointed by the Master of Coin at each royal mint who oversaw the production and shipment of money. Their coin was shipped north from the royal mint in King’s Landing. It would be more cost-effective to simply mint the gold themselves. There was also less risk of theft, since any ship carrying gold would invariably be targeted by pirates from the Stepstones who sailed the Narrow Sea. It seemed even her childhood dreams were thoughtful and pragmatic.

Wynne twisted her signet ring around her dainty index finger and gnawed anxiously on the inside of her cheek; she looked at him with her chin tilted downward, peeking out from behind her eyeglasses through her long eyelashes. It was a soft expression, vulnerability manifested and made flesh. “I’ll know if you betray me,” she informed him, “if you misuse any of this information—”

Roose smoothly rose to his feet and held her gaze while he crossed the room to stand before her. It annoyed him that she didn’t trust him, even though he understood that not trusting him was the wise choice. Roose cupped her face in his palm and tilted her chin up gently, inexorably. “I am not your enemy,” he said with soft vehemence, “I am your husband. Must I remind you of that?”

Wynne blushed and tugged her bottom lip in between her teeth, her fingers clutching the fabric of his tunic over his wrist as she nuzzled the heel of his palm. “Perhaps you should,” she said.


	13. The Harvest Feast {III}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 12: The Harvest Feast {III}
> 
> Roose and Wynne play the sort of game they both enjoy. Meanwhile, Aly Snow has a blind date with destiny.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **WARNING**: HERE THERE BE SMUT. If you’re not here for porn, skip ahead to the Aly POV. Otherwise, enjoy my further attempts to recontextualize mild D/s in a pseudo-medieval fantasy story. Now with spanking!

**Longing is a room built entirely of knives.**

Leslie Harrison, “[Sirens]”

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅠⅠⅠ ❧**

297 AC

_At Winterfell, the ancestral seat of House Stark, on the eastern edge of the wolfswood in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

Roose caressed her bottom lip with the callused pad of his thumb, slowly; her pulse spiked as her breath snagged in her throat and sped up, tangling in her chest before the dark sweet ache of arousal overwhelmed her. Gooseflesh prickled her skin as her cunt _throbbed_. Roose sucked on her upper lip teasingly before he kissed her hard. One strong hand gripped the back of her neck and twisted into her hair as the other grabbed her voluptuous ass, holding her body flush against his. Roose was coldhearted, but there was nothing cold about his kisses. His breath was hot and heavy on her skin. His thin lips were uncharacteristically soft. His tongue stroked inside her mouth roughly before he tugged her bottom lip in between his teeth and bit her until it stung, then sucked the sting away.

When she touched his face, his jaw and cheek were smooth. Desire held her like a knife to her throat, sharp and cruel. Most noblemen grew bored with their wives after they had done their duty and conceived a child, but Roose hadn’t married her for her fecundity. Wynne moaned into his mouth and kissed him back harder.

It felt so good to divulge the secrets that she gleaned from greenseeing and discuss her sequent prognostics and postulations. Wynne saw everything, but she didn’t _know_ everything. Insightful though she was, her impressions of the information she knew and the predictions she made about the future were rooted in her own perception of the past and present. There were no magical substitutes for the perspective of another person. So even though her instincts were screaming at her that Roose should not be trusted, she wanted to know if her lord of Bolton would betray her or not and she _needed _to entrust him with her secrets.

This was killing two birds with one stone. No matter what happened next, she would know everything that she needed to know.

Roose made a low noise deep in his throat and broke the kiss. “Do you trust me?” he asked, his voice hoarse with irrepressible need.

Something about the dark cadence of his quiet deep voice sent little thrills of desire skittering along her spine. “No,” she answered breathlessly. _I want to_, she thought, _but we don’t always get what we want_.

Roose smiled like a blade unsheathed in a darkened room. “Undress and sit on the bed with your legs spread,” he ordered.

Wynne hadn’t needed greensight to see that coming. They had arrived hours before the feast would begin, and he was incorrigible. Wynne stripped out of her chemise and folded the shift over the flat lid of her trunk before she untied the silk ribbons of her smallclothes, a shiver of anticipation lurching in her stomach and tumbling down her spine; she unfastened her garters and rolled her stockings down as her mind sank into a submissive headspace. It was a space in which the world narrowed down to her and the man who owned her, dark and warm and safe. There was no past and no future in subspace, and neither greenseeing nor woolgathering. Only pleasure derived from being utterly dominated.

Roose smiled wider at the sight of her sitting on the edge of the featherbed with her legs spread wide, her cunt exposed to his intense gaze; he hadn’t told her to spread the folds of her cunt open with her fingers, but she had because she knew he liked to look at her.

Wynne had been an ugly little girl: chubby and disquieting with sharp elbows, a head too big for a child’s body crowned by a scraggle of untamed bronze curls and a habit of hunching her shoulders until they seemed affixed to her earlobes. Bad posture could be corrected, and scraggly hair could be tamed, but ugliness had no cure. Wynne knew she wasn’t ugly now that she’d grown into her head and learned how to dress, but Roose looked at her in such a way that she actually _felt_ beautiful. Desirable. No longer the fatherless daughter that her mother never would’ve had if the world had been kinder, the littlest sister burdened with more than either of her older half-siblings, the last of her line. Just _her_, as though she herself was enough.

Roose stared at her, devouring her with his eyes as though she were the feast; the way his eyes fed upon her felt exquisite. “Touch yourself for me,” he ordered. “Use only two fingers when you peel the hood of your clit back, and play with your little cunt until you’re about to come.”

It was both thrilling and mortifying to feel how wet she already was for him. Wynne blushed hot from her hairline to the hollow of her throat as she dipped two fingertips into her sopping wet hole and teasingly stroked the slick glistening folds of her cunt before she rubbed her clit in a slow, tantalizing circle with one finger. It throbbed and swelled under her touch as she bit her lip and held his gaze. Sharp glints of pleasure shimmered over her skin and she tilted her hips, her breath soft and heavy in her lungs.

When she felt the sparks begin to creep up her spine and coil below her belly, she forced herself to stop and squeezed her eyelids shut as her hips shook in protest. Roose had tied her to their bed and kept her on the edge of coming for _hours _before, torturously bringing her to the brink and teasing her until she begged so much she choked on the words. Now he wrapped one strong hand around her wrist and brought her hand to his lips. Roose sucked her fingertips into his mouth and laved the pads of her fingers with his tongue, a groan bubbling up from low in his throat at the piquant taste of her before he scraped his teeth over the inside of her wrist and kissed the pale thin skin there. When his hands splayed over the curve of her hips, her eyelids fluttered and she moaned at the sensation of his mouth on her neck. Roose had taken his tunic off before he pinned her to the featherbed with his body; the hard muscles of his arms, back and bare chest held her under him and she felt his heartbeat as though it thrummed inside her own rib cage as his teeth scraped the delicate skin of her throat.

Nowhere was safer than where she lay, in the arms of her dread lord.

Roose kissed her again, hard and ruthless and unrelenting; his hands cupped her breasts and squeezed, his callused thumbs swirling roughly over her nipples before he pinched them between his thumbs and forefingers and twisted until she writhed underneath him. Wynne inhaled a harsh puff of air that she exhaled into his mouth as a lewd needful gust of noise and broke the kiss to nip his smooth jaw and plant kisses on his neck as her fingers dug into his nape. Roose slowly flicked her nipples with his fingertips as she licked the jut of his collarbone; he tasted like sweat and skin, a little salty and a little sweet. Each touch of his fingers sent fresh sparks of arousal trembling through her until she almost came just from the feel of his hands on her breasts.

As perspiration beaded on their bodies, her thighs began to stick to the leather of his breeches. Roose was able to rectify the situation by moving down her body and burying his face in between her legs and skimming his nose up over where she was hot and wet for him. One rough lick swept up her slit and smoothed over her hole. Roose deftly avoided her clit while the sides of his tongue gently rubbed against her folds with every stroke. Predatory satisfaction flared in his eyes as she watched him part her folds and stab her with his tongue, the hot tip glossing over her clit. Roose nibbled gently with his teeth and sucked the sensitive nub into his mouth. Everything felt swollen and wet and so _hot_. Wynne slapped both hands over her mouth to stifle a scream as shards of pleasure glimmered from the crown of her head to the tightly curled tips of her toes.

Roose kept teasing her sensitive nub with teeth and tongue while he slid two fingers inside of her knuckle deep and mercilessly coaxed more orgasms from her; he made a smug noise in the back of his throat as her cunt fluttered and clenched around them, a hum that she felt more than heard as her legs shook almost violently. “I didn’t give you permission to come,” he admonished. “How shall I punish you?”

Wynne almost pointed out that he never explicitly told her that she _didn’t_ have permission to come and it wasn’t fair of him to expect her to follow the rules of a game she hadn’t known he was playing, but she wanted him to punish her. No matter how flimsy the pretense. “However you want,” she whispered breathlessly.

Roose grabbed her hips and roughly turned her over so that she was sprawled on her stomach atop the blankets and furs, the wolf pelts soft against her nipples. His teeth sank hard into the side of her neck. He sucked upon the bruised skin gently and she whimpered. His tongue soothed the bite. Roose kissed her nape and moved his mouth to her shoulder blades, his lips hot on the skin of her back as his hands splayed over her thick waist to hold her where he wanted her. One long torturous lick claimed the curve of her spine and sent a bolt of arousal shooting through her until her whole body tingled from her fingertips to her toes, her overheated flesh incongruously cool where his tongue had been. Roose smoothed one of his hands from her waist to her ass as she dug her fingers into the furs beneath her. “Five swats,” he told her softly. “Count them.”

Then his palm came down on the right cheek of her ass with a harsh slapping noise that made what he was doing to her sound more painful than it felt. Wynne startled as pleasure knifed through her stomach and she gasped, “One.”

While pain was never a pleasant experience, it had a way of stripping away all other concerns. Until only the most primal instinct—survival—remained. Roose knew how to weaponize both pleasure and pain, but he never played the painful sort of games with her. When he tortured her, the reward was always worth the punishment. Roose enjoyed the way her pleasure could escalate, and the way pain brought her right back where she started so each touch felt almost like the first touch again. It was a means to that end. Roose stroked the fingers of his other hand up and down her slit in a ghost of a caress, until the sweet ache of her arousal was almost excruciating. Then he spanked her twice on the other cheek before he struck her right cheek again, aiming two of his strikes low so the aftershocks of the swats went straight to her throbbing core.

“Two,” she moaned and squealed, “Three. _Four!_”

Roose chucked as her cunt began to drip obscenely down her thighs. “This is a punishment,” he whispered, “you aren’t supposed to enjoy it.”

Wynne had stopped thinking coherently after her first earthshattering orgasm, but she still had the presence of mind to roll her eyes at him. “Five,” she gasped when the heel of his palm came down on top of her ass. There wasn’t as much flesh to cushion the blow, but he was only playing with her so the pain was fleeting.

Roose flicked her sore clit with one finger. “Do you think you’ve been punished enough?” he asked her as his thumb caressed her perineum.

Wynne shuddered and squirmed to prop herself up onto her elbows in a futile attempt to avoid even further smudging of her eyeglasses. “Yes,” she whimpered.

Roose fondled the reddened flesh of her ass; she couldn’t see his expression with her back to him and her third eye closed, but she didn’t need magic to know he was smirking in satisfaction at the sight of his handiwork. “Yet I remain unconvinced,” he whispered back and unlaced his breeches.

“How should I convince you?” she asked, getting her head back into the game.

Roose stepped out of his breeches; she heard the supple leather puddle on the floor behind her. “Get on all fours and stick your ass out for me,” he ordered.

Wynne had to crawl all the way up onto the featherbed as her legs shook with the aftershocks of each orgasm he had bestowed upon her, the muscles of her thighs still quivering as her husband moved to kneel behind her on top of the blankets and furs. It made her feel at home inside her body in a visceral way that nothing else did. There was something terribly ironic about the lord who bore flayed men on his banners paradoxically being the one who could make her feel comfortable in her own skin, but she was too far gone to dwell on that.

Roose taunted her by slowly dragging his blunt tip from the ring of her asshole to her clit, his precum dripping hot and slick on her oversensitive skin as his thick cock twitched and throbbed in between her thighs. “Do you want this, sweet girl?” he asked her, his voice deceptively quiet and calm.

“Yes,” Wynne answered, because it was always what he wanted to hear and because it was true.

“Then beg for it,” he whispered.

“Please,” she whispered back. “Please give me your cock, Roose. Please fuck me—”

When he grabbed her hips and thrust all the way inside of her, she actually sobbed with pleasure at the sensation of being so _full_. Roose groaned as she clenched tight around him and her cunt ached from the friction of him slipping out of her until only the head was inside and thrusting back in harder than before. With a grunt, he began to fuck her hard and slow. Roose circled her asshole with the rough pad of his thumb as his balls smacked her clit every time he bottomed out inside her, the fleshy obscene sounds of skin against skin pervading the room. When he thrust in deeper, the head of his cock bumped her cervix and sent a stab of bliss coruscating through her belly. Roose seemed to like her hips. Wynne had a slim waist compared to the rest of her, but she was never _thin_. There were curves in the right places on her body and in the wrong ones. Her breasts were too large and plump to ever be pert or firm, and they had already begun to sag. Her ass was too big; her thighs too thick. Her stomach wasn’t flat, and pregnancy was only going to make her fatter. Roose didn’t seem to care, however.

“Look at you,” he said, pitching his voice low to make her squirm and shake her hips as he moved deep within her. “Taking me so well. I think you always need to be fucked just like this, like you’re _mine_.”

Tension built in her muscles until she desperately moaned his name and begged for more. Roose tightened his grip on her hips, his fingernails digging into her soft flesh as she arched her back and a low growl bloomed in the depths of his chest. One strong arm curled possessively around her waist and he stroked the flat of his tongue along her carotid before he scraped his teeth over the divot behind her ear and nuzzled the curve of her helix with his nose.

“Come for me,” he ordered. Pearls of sweat were dripping on the cords of her neck, the arch of her spine. “Come for me right now.”

Wynne almost blacked out from the force of her orgasm being torn out of her with pleasure so thick it verged on pain. It made her feel as though she were floating as the frenetic beat of her heart obscured every other sound in the world and bright coronas of light flared in the darkness behind her eyelids. Roose came inside of her with a guttural moan and buried his face in the crook of her neck as she milked his cock dry. Some lewd part of her liked how warm she felt every time he filled her with his seed, even though it felt awkward dripping out of her. Wynne uncurled her fists and wriggled sluggishly under him, pleasantly numb and utterly exhausted. “Ngh,” she said succinctly.

Roose laughed softly, his breath ghosting over the sweat cooling on her skin as his palm flattened over her belly and he caressed her stomach with the pads of his fingers. “We still have several hours before the feast,” he murmured, “more than enough time for a hot bath and a nap.”

Wynne made an inarticulate noise in agreement. Roose nuzzled the nape of her neck before he left the featherbed to find a cloth and clean up the mess he made of her. Wynne fell headfirst into dreamless slumber without further ado; the next thing she knew, someone was knocking on the door. It became apparent that someone had removed her eyeglasses. Wynne blinked indolently as her other senses immediately sharpened to compensate for how ironically bad her eyesight was and bombarded her with sensation: the smell of burning tallow candles tinted with lavender scented oil and the sound of softly crackling flames, a pillow beneath her head, the comfortable weight of the furs on top of her and the luxurious texture of the silken bedsheets around her, a distinct lack of sweat on her body and no seed dripping out of her to stain her thighs or dry into crust on the blankets.

Roose had taken care of her like he always did after they played such games; he wasn’t in bed with her because he had gone to answer the door. _Ellara_, she thought, _come to help me bathe and dress before the feast_. Wynne typically washed herself and brushed out her own hair, but Ellara braided and styled it for her and laced her into her more formal gowns. Most traditional braided hairstyles were too complicated for anyone to do by themselves, as was formalwear. It was as though all tradition was built upon keeping women soft and helpless…and tradition was like instincts, only substantially crueler.

* * *

One week ago, a raven had spoken to Aly with the voice of a woman.

It was a raven from the rookery at Winterfell, one with an iridescent purple sheen to its plumage that shone in the afternoon sunlight filtering into the library tower through the pane of the window at her back as she reread _Against the Unnatural_. Maester Vanyon had written the book in response to _Dragons, Wyrms, and Wyverns: Their Unnatural History_ by Septon Barth, a text condemned by the Citadel and burned by Baelor the Blessed. Barth had been a sorcerer, allegedly; he believed the Children of the Forest spoke to ravens and taught birds how to speak in words.

According to his speculations, the First Men were taught how to communicate with ravens by the Children of the Forest and sent raven messages to one another that weren’t penned with ink. When the Andals invaded Westeros and the First Men broke the Pact of the Isle of Faces, the art was lost. Aly startled as the raven flew in through an open window and perched on the back of the empty oaken chair across the heavy wooden table from her.

“I have the only surviving copy of _Unnatural History_,” the raven said, not in a raucous quork but in a dulcet susurration. “If you’d like to borrow it. Princess Elaena Targaryen—younger sister of Daeron the Young Dragon and Baelor the Blessed—was my great-great-great-grandmother. Jeyne Waters, her eldest daughter, wed my great-great-grandfather and brought the copy her mother saved from the flames north with her. Septon Barth wasn’t historically accurate, but banned books are always an interesting read.”

Aly, like her brother Robb, had to learn the lines of descent for each noble family in the North as far back as ten generations. It was meant to remind the children of each House that every family in the North was connected by centuries of blood ties, consanguinity that often became ephemeral and brittle enough to break in times of war. Jeyne Waters had been wed to Lord Bennard Dustin, their son Lord Alyn had been wed to Lady Alysanne Stark, their son Lord Royce had been wed to Lady Agnes Blackwood, their son Lord Willam had been wed to Lady Barbrey Ryswell, and _their_ daughter…

“Lady Bolton,” Aly said in a hush, her chest gone tight as the stuff of fables alighted on the snarling heraldic direwolf head carved into the wood of the chair.

If a bird could grin, this one would have. Aly heard the smile in the voice of the woman speaking through its beak from over fifty leagues away. “Your Grace,” the raven said.

_Wynne doesn’t think any less of those bastard-born_, her cousin Mel told her after they had stolen a bottle of sylvaner from the kitchens and gotten drunk in the godswood during the harvest feast half a year before,_ but she’ll call you a bastard to your face just to see how you react. I wouldn’t make an enemy of her. It would be the last thing you ever did_.

Aly scowled. There was no one else on this floor of the library tower, but still the urge to look around furtively overcame her. “What do you want?” she whispered.

“From you?” the Lady of the Dreadfort asked in a voice like honey and hemlock as the raven puffed up its feathered hackles. “I want the opportunity to see if any of the eggs you weren’t able to hatch are meant for me, and to discuss the reason why your father impregnated your mother even though he knew he was putting her life at risk. My lord husband and I will be attending the harvest feast at Winterfell in a sennight. We’ll speak then.”

Aly watched the raven fly away, her retort festering in her throat. Lady Bolton hadn’t threatened her. Not explicitly. _Your Grace_ had meant _I know who you are_. Which didn’t come as much of a surprise. Lady Bolton was a greenseer—of course she knew. No secrets were safe from one such as she.

Lady Bolton had asked for an opportunity to see if she might be able to hatch one of the dragon eggs, and that meant she knew about Frostfyre, Steelsong, and Proudwing. Perhaps she knew who Proudwing was meant for as well. Aly wasn’t sure if she wanted the Lady of the Dreadfort to hatch a dragon. Roose Bolton was courteous and disarmingly soft-spoken, but even so Lord Eddard had never trusted him. Lady Bolton had chosen him over all of the other eligible suitors in the North and even some from south of the Neck for a reason that eluded her. Maybe they really were in love, but Aly was cynical enough that she doubted it. Lady Bolton was seventeen; Lord Bolton was three-and-forty. Lady Bolton was beautiful; Lord Bolton was plain. Lady Bolton was heir to Barrowton, one of two cities in the North; Lord Bolton was lord of ice fisheries and farmlands and fear. If she were ambitious, Lady Bolton would have ousted her mother by right of birth and ruled Barrowton as lady regnant once she came of age. Only instead of doing so, Wynne had cited the Widow’s Law enacted by Good Queen Alysanne to defer her claim on her birthright until either her marriage or her mother’s death. Which had scandalized the high lords of the North, many of whom had been hoping one of their younger sons might take her to wife and become the Lord of Barrowton. Now that scandal was a year old, and it had fizzled out into bitter resentment. Roose Bolton had chosen to abnegate the lordship of the Barrowlands when he married Wynne, so the resentment of the northern lords hadn’t been rekindled upon their marriage.

If power was all she wanted, Wynne hadn’t needed to marry in order to obtain it. Lord Bolton _was_ very wealthy, since his lands yielded gold and jewels as well as fish and crops, but Lady Bolton hadn’t needed to marry for money either. It didn’t make any sense. Unless relocating from Barrow Hall to the Dreadfort was a strategic move and she was in need of a fortress that had never been truly breached.

Aly sighed. If Lady Bolton had wanted to stage a coup, she would’ve done so during her wedding feast whilst all of the northern lords were in her castle surrounded by her husband’s men and too deep in their cups to fight back. Aly had three dragons, but Lady Bolton was a greenseer and scorpions were built into the walls of the Dreadfort. If she flew on dragonback, Lady Bolton would see that coming and shoot them out of the sky before they got close enough to set the fortress ablaze. Aly didn’t like feeling outmaneuvered, but she couldn’t outwit a panmnesiac who also had prophetic dreams. No one could.

When the first day of the harvest feast was upon her, Aly waited in the gatehouse with Jon until the Mormonts had arrived before she took her cousin aside. Mel looked very much like the engravings of their grandmother Lady Lyarra: tall and muscular with broad shoulders for a woman and wild dark hair tangled into a thick messy braid. There was some icy blue in the grey of her eyes and she had warm skin with golden undertones that was closer to her mother’s coloring than her father’s, but she had inherited the long stern face of the Starks. If anyone could keep the Lady of the Dreadfort in check, it would be her sister.

Mel took the lead as they entered the guesthouse. Jon carried the eggs in two baskets with scraps of roughspun cloth thrown over the scaled eggshells while Aly skulked up the stairs. Mel snorted at her trepidation. “Wynne is scared,” she said. “My sweet sister has always been afraid. Which is understandable, because she knows everything the world has forgotten. When people are raped or molested or abused, she knows. When skinchangers are hunted down like dogs, she knows. When people are starving or sick or suffering, she knows. Wynne _always_ knows, and she’s had to live with that for most of her life. At some point, you just go numb.”

“Or else you’d go mad,” Jon said.

Mel nodded, short and bittersweet. “Wynne learned she couldn’t save everyone by trying and failing until her bleeding heart was broken,” she said, “she overcorrected by pretending that seeing or foreseeing things didn’t mean they were her problem until she _almost_ believed that. If she’s meddling, then something has gone horribly wrong.”

“You’re not making me want to speak with her,” Aly muttered.

Mel snorted again before she unfurled one of her arms in a flourish. “Go ahead,” she retorted and pointed down the hallway, “try to outrun the inevitable. See how far you get.”

Aly looked at Jon as her twin hunched over and put the baskets on the floor. _I won’t run_, she thought, and knocked on the door.


	14. The Harvest Feast {IV}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 13: The Harvest Feast {IV}
> 
> Jon and Aly meet the Lord and Lady of the Dreadfort and discuss the prophecy that almost tore apart the realm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Vorian Dayne](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Vorian_Dayne) was canonically the Sword of the Evening so House Dayne having two ancestral blades with corresponding honorary titles makes total sense…AND NONE FOR <s>GRETCHEN WIENERS</s> DARKSTAR BYE.

**She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,**   
**that nobody looks.**

W. B. Yeats, “The Long-Legged Fly”

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅠⅤ ❧**

297 AC

_At Winterfell, the ancestral seat of House Stark, on the eastern edge of the wolfswood in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

Ned Stark’s bastards weren’t Ned Stark’s bastards. Roose had figured that out after Lady Mayseline visited the Dreadfort a month ago. If the princess that was promised had been Rhaenys Targaryen, Bloodraven wouldn’t have entrusted Dark Sister to Wynne. If Princess Rhaenys wasn’t the promised one, then Rhaegar Targaryen had another daughter. If Prince Rhaegar had another daughter, her mother must have been Lyanna Stark.

Roose hadn’t shared his deductions with his wife because he was sure Wynne already knew. Eddard Stark had hidden his niece and nephew in plain sight and she was a greenseer—a greenseer whose father had been cut down attempting to rescue the Lady Lyanna from the tower where she died. If she didn’t know, he would swallow his flensing knife whole.

Which begged the question: would she trust him enough to tell him this secret?

Roose desperately wanted her to trust him. It would make their life together much easier and grant him access to the figural and literal wealth of information she possessed. Wynne had found a field of gold, veins of silver, and deposits of diamonds on his lands. Soon he would be one of the richest men in Westeros because of her. Wynne had plans for that wealth, but he wasn’t going to interfere as long as those clever plans of hers kept them alive come winter.

Although he did hope the wildlings could be persuaded to regarrison the castles on the Wall. If not, they would have to hire a company of sellswords and sellswords were expensive.

Wynne made a soft noise in her sleep and nuzzled his shoulder through his tunic. It was a habit that she picked up from horses, the first beasts she ever skinchanged into. Roose smiled and stroked her magnificent hair as she nestled closer to him. Soft brass curls shone in the candlelight, more precious than any metal or gem because they were part of the woman he…

Someone broke the comfortable silence that had permeated the room and knocked on the door. Roose went from warm and supine to cold as ice before he rose smoothly to his feet and went to answer it.

* * *

Lord Bolton answered the door and looked at her with grey eyes as pale as fog, pale as mist; he wore a sleeveless black leather jerkin with decorative laces crisscrossed at his collar and shoulders over a silk doublet in a pale shade of pink slashed with dark red satin, black leather breeches, boots and a leather belt stamped with the sigil of the flayed man and fastened with a silver buckle around his trim waist. There was a sharpness to his movements that implied the potential for violence. Lord Bolton wasn’t even attempting to blunt his edges, nor conceal the predatory gleam in his gaze. It wasn’t sexual. This was a purely cold and dispassionate assessment. Aly flinched as the emptiness in his pale eyes made a chill run down her spine, one that she felt so deep in her bones she couldn’t stop herself from shivering. There was a stillness about him. It wasn’t serenity, but rather a quiet and competent sort of alertness devoid of emotion. Aly curtsied deeply and felt her blood run cold as that chilling gaze went from her to her brother to Mel, who arched her eyebrows at the Lord of the Dreadfort implacably.

Only predators who meant you harm concealed themselves. Mel had lived with the Mormonts for over a decade, and they purportedly turned into bears when the mood struck them. Thus, she was no stranger to predators. “Where’s my sister?” she asked him.

“Wynne is asleep.” Lord Bolton’s deep voice had a whispery edge, like steel being honed and sharpened. “I’d prefer not to wake her.”

Aly peered surreptitiously around him at the girl in featherbed and flinched when the first greenseer born in the North in centuries looked back.

“I’m awake,” Lady Bolton said as she adjusted her bronze-rimmed eyeglasses with two fingers.

Jon blushed as she emerged from the blankets and furs wearing only a gold signet ring inlaid with the sigil of House Dustin in black filigree on the index finger of her right hand and a white-gold ring set with an oval-cut chrysochlorous gemstone on the third finger of her left, even though her hair was long enough to cover her breasts in a bright cloak of curls before she draped a mantle over her shoulders. It was a pale shade of pink overlaid with black lace, lined with red velvet and trimmed in black foxfur; the hem was indecently short, but everything above her knees and below her throat was covered. Aly had been expecting a beautiful monster, not a voluptuous girl awakening from a nap in a state of dishabille with a deep love bite on her neck and dark circles underneath her eyes. Lady Bolton was _exhausted_. There was nothing monstrous about her. Only a green enkindling of magic, sweet as springtime and soft as loam. It was tinged with blood and fire, iron and candleflame. Valyrian magic that had mingled with the magic of the First Men and the forest.

Lord Bolton narrowed his eyes at Jon and looked as if he wanted to gouge his eyes out. Until his wife put a hand on his forearm and a moment of silent communication passed between them in the space of her fingers squeezing gently through his sleeve. Lord Bolton stepped out of the doorway and pulled out a chair as the door swung closed discreetly behind them. Another moment of silent communication, and Lady Bolton elegantly sat as her husband swept his spotted pink cloak over her legs. Lord Bolton stood by her side, his strong hands clasped in front of him and his face impassive. Aly knew he had at least one knife hidden on his person, if not more. _Gods_, she thought,_ they truly are in love_.

Envy roiled in her gut and sank its teeth into her, a lump forming deep in her throat. Aly wasn’t truly a bastard, but she had grown up believing that she was and she had overheard every bad thing people whispered about her and her twin brother. Lord Stark had dishonored his lady and wife by siring them and shamed her by raising them alongside his trueborn sons and daughters. All bastards were born from weakness, lust and lies. All trueborn offspring were born blessed by the gods because they had been conceived in the marriage bed, while bastards were sinful because they were made on the wrong side of the blanket. All bastards were treacherous by nature.

There were men from the Winter Town who propositioned her because they believed that bastard-born girls were intrinsically wanton, and those same awful men didn’t trust Jon around their sisters or daughters or wives because they believed bastard-born boys were base and predisposed to rape. It was Theon who fucked their sisters and daughters and wives, while Jon had never so much as kissed a woman. Aly had never been kissed, either. Nobody had ever looked at her the way Lord Bolton had looked at his wife, as though she were the answer to a question that he’d been asking forever.

Lady Bolton wasn’t frowning or scowling at them, but she had a darkness in her eyes and that spoke of something bad on the horizon.

Mel broke the silence, if not the ice. “What’s so wrong that you’ve deigned to bestir yourself?” she asked her sister. It would’ve been an accusation coming from anyone else, but Mel only sounded concerned.

Lady Bolton snorted. “Others slaughtered eight wildlings, Ser Waymar Royce, and a ranger named Will three months ago,” she answered, “on the longest day of the year. Their bodies were arranged in a spiral pattern when the sun rose to its highest point in the sky. In three months, another sacrifice will be performed on the shortest day of the year. Each solstice will bring a new sacrifice until the sun is eclipsed, and the Long Night begins again. We have seven years to prepare for the prophesized War for the Dawn.”

Aly gaped at her. _Thousands of years ago_, Old Nan had once told her and her brother and Robb as they sat at her feet, _a winter fell that was cold and hard and endless beyond all memory of man. There came a night that lasted a generation. Kings shivered and died in their castles even as the swineherds perished in their hovels. Women smothered their children rather than see them starve, and felt the tears freeze on their cheeks as they cried. In that darkness, the cold things came._

_They hated iron and fire and the touch of the sun, and every creature with hot blood in their veins. They felled the heroes and the armies of the First Men by the score, hunted fair maids through the forests, and fed their hosts of the slain the flesh of human children. They swept over holdfasts and cities and kingdoms, riding their dead horses and pale white spiders. Until only the last hero was left_.

It was just a story. One that had a happy ending, since the last hero found the Children of the Forest and vanquished the Others with his flaming sword. It was just a story, so why did she feel so afraid?

* * *

Wynne had seen the bastards of Winterfell before with her third eye, but it struck her again when she looked upon them with her actual eyes how _Targaryen _the princess was: silver-gold hair, pale unblemished skin, violet eyes. Most people who saw her thought her mother had been Ashara Dayne. House Dayne was a great noble house descended from the First Men who had ruled the western Red Mountains of Dorne as Kings and Queens of the Torrentine. Dawn and Dusk, their ancestral swords, were forged of steel from a fallen star. House Dayne were dragonriders once, but they weren’t of Valyrian descent—their forebears were skinchangers who rode the indigenous dragons of Westeros for centuries before they migrated to the Shadow Lands, three thousand years before the early days of the Valyrian empire. No dragons were ever able to conquer Dorne because the Dornishmen and women had been dealing with dragons since before the Battle for the Dawn.

House Targaryen had brought the dragons back to Westeros four hundred years ago, but they had chained and caged them and their dragons had died out. During the reign of Aegon the Dragonbane, Grand Maester Alford had poisoned the last dragon because there was no place for magic in the world the Citadel was building.

There were dragons in Westeros again, with riders descended from the First Men and Old Valyria—and theirs was the song of ice and fire. Wynne sat in the chair and waited for them to take it all in. There was nothing else she could do.

“Have you told our father?” Jon asked.

“Lord Stark has been informed,” Roose answered.

“This isn’t the sort of problem that should be solved by keeping our liege in the dark,” Wynne deadpanned. Underneath the snark was fear, rich and thick as honey. “My husband scares most people no matter how sweet and soft-spoken he acts, and I offended almost every northern lord by marrying him instead of their sons or grandsons or nephews. Lord Stark has their loyalty and respect. Which is a weapon I want to have in our arsenal.”

Roose smiled at her. It made her skin tingle, warmth suffusing her in spite of her anxiety.

“Lord Stark can help us win this war by calling his banners if and when the Wall is breached either by the wildlings led by Mance Rayder or the army of white walkers and wights they’re running from,” Wynne said, “he cannot help me hatch enough dragons to burn the army of white walkers and wights to ashes. I have a dear friend—another greenseer—who’s collected fourteen dragon eggs, not including the one she hatched into a dragon named Antimony. With the clutch you found, we have eighteen.”

Jon stared at her shrewdly. “Four dragons and eighteen eggs,” he said. “One of which you’re hoping to hatch.”

Wynne nodded. “I have distant Targaryen ancestry,” she explained, “Princess Elaena Targaryen was my great-great-great-grandmother. One of the Great Bastards of Aegon the Unworthy, Mya Rivers, was my great-great-grandmother. Princess Rhaena Targaryen married Ser Garmund Hightower and had six daughters by him. One of them, Helaine, wed Lord Cregard Dustin, my great-great-great-grandfather. Viviane, her twin sister, wed Lord Medgar Tully, also my great-great-great-grandfather. Lady Celia Tully wed my great-grandfather Lord Brynden Blackwood after Jaehaerys the Clever broke his betrothal with her to marry his sister. Do you know why he forced his children to marry each other?”

It was Aly who answered. “Because a woodswitch brought to court by Jenny of Oldstones told the king the Prince That Was Promised would be born of their line,” she said.

“Only the promised one isn’t a prince,” Wynne said as her anxiety and anticipation twisted her stomach into excruciatingly intricate knots, “she’s a princess. ‘When the red star bleeds and the cold winds blow, the long summer will end and the prince that was promised shall rise to deliver the world from darkness. This promised one shall be Azor Ahai come again, born amidst salt and smoke to wake dragons out of stone and draw forth the burning sword from the flames to bring the dawn, for his is the song of ice and fire.’ Valyrian has no gendered pronouns, and that prophecy was originally made by a sorcerer who spoke the language we know as High Valyrian. However, the prophecy was recorded by the spellsingers of Asshai. Their language has gendered pronouns, so all subsequent translations defaulted to male.”

“Women are nothing if not overlooked and underestimated,” Mel quipped.

“True enough,” Wynne said dryly, “but I don’t see how anyone could overlook _you_, tall as you are.”

Mel smirked at her. “We can’t all be short,” she retorted without malice.

Wynne rolled her eyes behind her eyeglasses. “I think most prophecies aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, but at least two parts of this one have already come to pass. You woke dragons out of stone,” she reminded Aly, “which is one component of the prophecy fulfilled and something no one else has done in centuries. There are still dragons in the Shadow Lands, descended from the dragons who migrated from Westeros before the Battle for the Dawn and chose not to emigrate to Valyria five thousand years ago, but no dragonriders. You’re going to help me, promised one or not.”

Aly scowled at her, and her classical Valyrian features were delicate enough that she looked irritatingly lovely in spite of the snarl lurking in the curve of her lips. “Do I have a choice?” she asked, even though Wynne didn’t need greensight to see that she knew the answer.

“No,” Roose said and smiled again, thin-lipped and chilling. “Unless you want the Others and their wights to destroy us all.”

Jon turned on Mel, his face soured by something he perceived as betrayal. “You knew about this,” he accused.

“I had no idea there was a prophecy afoot,” Mel informed him. “Wynne doesn’t tell me everything. Or anything, actually…but I’ve known you weren’t Ned Stark’s bastards for years. Cre is a warg and a shapechanger, and wolves can scent if someone is blood kin and how close the blood ties are. So you _do_ smell like our cousins, but you _don’t_ smell like Ned Stark’s children. Cre scented you both in the wolfswood once while he was running with his pack and that was that.”

Aly scowled harder. “You didn’t think we should know?” she asked sharply.

“I thought it didn’t matter,” said Mel. “Does knowing whose seed you sprang from change anything? I don’t think so. Unless you want to reclaim the Iron Throne, you have to stay hidden. There’s no other way for you to stay alive. I never told you because you were eight when Cre first caught your scent and I was afraid you would let it slip the next time Lady Stark called you ‘bastard,’ just to make her eat her words.”

Jon looked away; his jaw clenched as the boy struggled to swallow his pride. Which told her that he would’ve done exactly that without truly understanding the consequences. Mel also wasn’t the person he and his sister were actually angry at, but she was a convenient target for bitterness that had aged much like the finest of wine.

“No one has the power to change the past,” Wynne said and she was proud that she kept her voice from trembling, “we have the power to shape the future. There is a prophecy afoot, but we’re the ones who choose how to fulfill it. Now,” she canted her chin and hazel eyes met pale violet, “make a choice.”

Aly held her gaze before she grabbed one of the wicker baskets her twin had carried into the solar by the handle and uncovered its contents. Two dragon eggs glittered in the candlelight. Aly cradled one in both hands and held it out to her.

“Good choice,” Wynne murmured.

* * *

Jon Snow was a boy of sixteen and he was arguably the rightful heir to the Iron Throne, but if he kept staring at his wife like that, Roose wouldn’t be held responsible for his actions. Perhaps he merely had a preference for red hair. It was still rude to ogle something that didn’t belong to you.

Roose wasn’t ogling the dragon eggs because he had seen their like before. Wynne had two she kept locked in a box inside one of her many weirwood trunks: one bloodred with black whorls and gold flecks, and one that shone like silver and beaten gold. Roose didn’t have so much as a drop of dragon in him, so he couldn’t hatch a dragon egg if he wanted to. Nor could he control a dragon once hatched, since he wasn’t a beastling.

From everything his wife had told him about skinchanging, he knew the bond formed between creature and human irrevocably changed both human and creature. Wynne picked up avian gesticulation and equine means of expressing affection; the unkindness of ravens she brought with her from Barrow Hall spoke messages aloud instead of carrying them on paper, identified the recipients of those messages by sight, and knew how to fly between any number of castles. Aly Snow had ostensibly imbued her dragons with enough intelligence for them to survive unseen and unslain.

It was a frightening thought. While humans were the dominant species the world over, they were apex predators only because they outnumbered and outsmarted all of the bigger and stronger beasts. Hyperintelligent birds were one thing. Wynne’s ravens were magical and more importantly, _useful_. Hyperintelligent dragons were something worse.

Jon met his eyes and looked away, his cheeks darkening with mortification at being caught staring.

Roose smiled more to himself than at the boy. “There’s a whore at the brothel in Winter Town,” he said mildly, “with red hair. If that’s what you prefer. I’d thank you to set those eyes of yours on her instead of what’s mine.”

Jon bit his lip and swallowed hard. “I tried once,” he mumbled. “Robb and Theon brought me to the brothel on my sixteenth nameday, but I couldn’t do it.” Then he looked up and met his eyes again. “Only a whore like Ros would fuck a bastard, but I couldn’t do it.”

“You were afraid of getting her pregnant,” Roose deduced. It wasn’t an irrational fear. Ramsay had been one of the worst things he ever did, and he would have gotten even worse if Wynne hadn’t slit his throat.

Jon nodded, curtly. “I sat there and watched her take off her clothes,” he said, “but all I could think about was…what if she had a child, or even twins. More bastard-born children named Snow.”

“Ros drinks contraceptive moon tea or a tincture of wild carrot seed to prevent conception,” Wynne informed him as she quelled the sharp pang of her disappointment and picked up another dragon egg. “Most prostitutes do, since unplanned and unwanted pregnancies would endanger their livelihood.”

There were also many sexual acts that didn’t come with the risk of pregnancy. Cunnilingus. Anilingus. Fellatio. Irrumatio. Frottage. Pearl necklaces. Fingering. Outercourse was a broad spectrum of carnality, and heterosexual anal intercourse had been used as a crude form of birth control since the dawn of days. Whereas homosexual anal intercourse was something men enjoyed if properly lubricated, because prostate stimulation was apparently quite pleasurable.

Women only enjoyed anal stimulation if they had been properly lubricated and properly trained, but men who desired anal sex rarely made the effort. Roose had been surreptitiously making the effort, first by teasing her asshole with his fingers and tongue without penetrating her and of late by playing with her ass while he fucked her; he did so when she was on the precipice of coming, to push her over the edge with anal stimulation and make her beg for more. Wynne hadn’t told him that she knew exactly what he was doing, because she appreciated how much he wanted her to enjoy sex with him. It was such a far cry from how he had treated Rue—the miller’s widow—and she knew he treated her well because she was highborn and therefore more valuable than a peasant girl. Which left a bad taste in her mouth. Albeit one that was somewhat mitigated by the knowledge that her husband hadn’t raped anyone else, and the seigniorial tradition of the first night right wouldn’t illicitly be upheld by House Bolton any longer because of her. Wynne had known her body was a commodity, both as something pretty and something with intrinsic royal bloodlines, and she had used that fact to her advantage as much as she could.

There were things a lady shouldn’t talk about. Perhaps sexual intercourse shouldn’t be one of them. It might lead to less misunderstandings.

“Oh,” Jon said, because he didn’t seem to know what else to say.

Wynne smiled at him shyly. “It’s sweet that you valued her future more than your own desire,” she murmured, “Prince Rhaegar impregnated your mother to fulfill his interpretation of the prophecy even though he knew pregnancy could be hazardous to her health. Rhaegar may have loved her, but he was mad for portents in spite of how shortsighted he was.”

“You’re carrying my child,” Roose said in his most neutral tone. There was an unspoken question in those words about whether her pregnancy was putting her life at risk—and whether she was blaming him for planting his seed inside of her.

Wynne adamantly shook her head. “Actions have consequences,” she told him. “These are consequences I wanted, even though I’m pretty sure we’re having twins. Elsewise, I would have insisted on drinking moon tea for the next few years even though you’re not getting any younger.”

Roose also wasn’t getting any older because of the bloodbaths, but that was neither here nor there.

Wynne had chosen to risk getting pregnant despite how young she was and now she wanted to remain pregnant, because the resurgence of the Long Night was looming in her not-so-distant future and this might be her only chance to have children. Seven years doubtless seemed like a very long time for other teenage girls, but greenseers knew how fast time flew. Seven years was an eyeblink. Seven years would never be enough.

“How sure?” Roose wanted to know.

Wynne shrugged, her shoulders hunching to make the acquaintance of her earlobes. “I dreamed of two leeches inside my womb gorging themselves with my blood,” she informed him. “Which isn’t the _worst_ metaphor the gods ever came up with, but it was still disturbing to dream of.”

“Not as disturbing as a flayed baby,” Mel said.

Although she and her sister were as different as the sun and moon, sometimes they were also oddly similar. Wynne chortled softly and reached for a third dragon egg. Its furfuraceous shell felt hot beneath her fingertips and she gasped, a sharp intake of breath that almost got caught in her throat on the way to her lungs as her chest filled with apprehension that swooped down through her stomach. _Bloodraven was right_, she thought. _I was always Targaryen enough_.

* * *

Last night he dreamt the castle was empty and he wandered the halls of Winterfell searching for Lord Eddard, descending into the crypts. In the dark, he heard the bloodcurdling scrape of stone on stone. When he peered at the shadows cast by the lantern he held, he saw dead kings stumbling out of their cold black graves. Jon awoke with his heart hammering in his chest as terror sank its teeth into him, and he dared not go back to sleep.

“Do you always dream of the future in metaphors?” he asked.

Lady Bolton narrowed her eyes at him behind her eyeglasses. “Yes,” she answered, “I use knowledge gleaned from the past and present to interpret them.”

“Targaryens dream of the future,” Jon said. “Don’t they?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Daenys the Dreamer, who foresaw the Doom of Valyria. Daeron the Drunken, who dreamed of dragons returning to Westeros. Daemon the Younger, who led the Second Blackfyre Rebellion. Bloodraven, of course, but he’s a greenseer so his prophetic dreams are green dreams. There were others, since long before the Conquest.”

“You keep talking about Lord Bloodraven in the present tense,” Jon observed.

Lady Bolton made a soft, mellifluous humming sound low in her throat. “Bloodraven is alive,” she informed him. “He lives with the last of the Children of the Forest in a cave beyond the Wall. He’s grafted onto an ancient weirwood tree, body and soul. He watches the world through raven eyes.”

“A thousand eyes,” Jon murmured, “and one.”

Lady Bolton snorted, one corner of her lips curving into a crooked smile. It was a beautiful smile, and he averted his eyes in the hopes that her husband wouldn’t see that he was blushing all over again. Jon wasn’t even attracted to her, exactly. It was just a bit overwhelming to have a pretty highborn girl pay attention to him without snootily looking down her nose at him or ignoring him because he was a bastard and therefore beneath even her contempt. Lady Bolton knew he _wasn’t_ a bastard, of course. Only she wasn’t treating him like a prince, either. “What did you dream of?” she asked him.

“I dreamt of the Kings of Winter and Kings in the North rising from their graves,” Jon said. “Was that a metaphor for the Others and their wights?”

Lady Bolton muffled a yawn in the hollow of one palm, her other hand still cradling her dragon egg. “My apologies,” she mumbled before she answered his question. “I hope for your sake that it’s a metaphor, because if you interpret that dream literally then your dead are going to start walking and kill you in your sleep. Which is not my idea of fun and why all the eponymous barrows in the Barrowlands are full of funerary urns and caches of dragonglass weapons, not decaying corpses. Barrowton was a wooden city built on top of a subterranean city where the Children of the Forest dwelled and ruled underground, once. My ancestors lived amongst them until the Kings of Winter slaughtered them during the Thousand Years War.”

Acerbic bitterness had suffused her low and sweet voice, dark and deep as a wild and untamed forest. Lord Bolton had said Aly didn’t have a choice, but neither did Lady Bolton. Not if she wanted to survive. There were three greenseers in the world, and she was the one who had the ear of the Lord of Winterfell. It fell on her to rally the North to her cause—the eminently worthy cause of not being blindsided by inhuman monsters that had become tales to make children shiver in the last eight thousand years.

Jon knew that many northern lords and their men would question her word and ignore her warnings because Lady Bolton was a woman, and they would’ve done so even if she hadn’t spurned their sons and grandsons and nephews. Although depriving them of a lordship for their second, third, fourth or even fifth sons hadn’t endeared her to them. Letting his father tell his lords bannermen instead was a smart move. It might actually be taken seriously coming from him. “Will you hatch your dragon here, my lady?” his sister asked.

Lady Bolton shook her head. “Wynne,” she corrected. “I think we’re past the point of formalities.”

Jon frowned in disquieting agreement. Lady Bolton knew something true about him that he would be struggling to accept for a while yet. If that didn’t put them on a first name basis, he didn’t know what else would.

“I’ll call you Wynne if you promise not to call me _Your Grace_ ever again,” Aly retorted.

Wynne snorted and somehow made derisive amusement sound delicate. “I promise,” she murmured, “and in answer to your question: I won’t hatch my dragon here because I won’t be able to hide a dragon. It was something you could do because this is where you live. Which gave you opportunities to sneak milk out of the kitchens and hunt small game in the wolfswood and even steal chickens. I, however, am the first greenseer born in the North in three centuries and this is the first social event I have attended since my wedding. All eyes are upon me.”

It was true. For every northerner who believed the Lady of the Dreadfort was blessed and beloved of the gods, another believed her to be an eldritch abomination.

Wynne smiled ruefully. “History consigned my like to myths and crib tales,” she whispered. “There are those who wish we had remained the stuff of legends. I cannot even blame them for being afraid. They _should_ fear me. No matter how much I would have them feel otherwise. They’d be stupid not to.”

Neither she nor his sister had chosen their fate, but that didn’t make Wynne less capable of using her magic to hurt people who didn’t have the power to stop her from doing so. No one had the power to stop Aly from conquering the North as their ancestors once had, either. Nobody but Wynne.

There was the unspoken, unanswered question of culpability that hung over them like a dark cloud. If greenseers saw everything but did nothing, could they be held accountable for their inaction? How much of themselves did they owe to the world?

_Nothing_, Jon thought. _They don’t owe the world anything, and that’s what makes them dangerous_. “Lord Stark has petitioned the king to legitimize us,” he told her.

“I know,” Wynne said, not unkindly. Because of course she knew. “King Robert will grant it, because for all his faults, he loves your…father.”

There was so much scorn in her voice when she uttered the words _King Robert_ that Mel guffawed. “I hope you never get summoned to court in King’s Landing,” she giggled. “When you dislike someone, it’s written all over your face. I know you’re keeping almost every secret in the history of the world, but you’re still a terrible liar.”

“Yes,” Lord Bolton said fondly, “she is, isn’t she?”

Wynne responded by rolling her eyes so far back in her head that only the whites of her eyes showed. “What’s true depends upon who is speaking and where they stand,” she muttered, “but I’d choose ugly truths over pretty lies every time.”

* * *

Lady Bolton came to her in the afternoon and whisked her upstairs to her father’s solar whilst Palla fetched them a six-week-old puppy from the kennels. It was a sweet little thing, a brindled herding dog called a corgi with huge dark brown eyes and a wet black nose. Lady Bolton sat in a chair across the room and held the corgi against her chest as she elegantly swept her skirts underneath her. Sansa hadn’t noticed how short Lady Bolton was until they stood face to face, but she was almost half a foot shorter than Sansa even though Lady Bolton was five years and seven moons older than her. This disparity in height didn’t seem to faze the Lady of the Dreadfort, however.

Sansa desperately tried to ignore the eerie awareness that was making the fine hairs on her arms and at the back of her neck stand on end as she eyed the gown she wore. It wasn’t as elaborate as the gown she wore at her wedding, but still beautiful. Her skirts weren’t fluffed up with gauze and gossamer. She wore no decorative surcoat or mantle. Her skirts instead flared out from the waistline to drape and swish in a way that allowed for some freedom of movement.

Its bodice consisted of a panel of the palest pink pearlescent silk adorned with ornate silver clasps and trimmed in black lace at the square neckline, attached to swaths of velvet striped deep black and dark red that bracketed the panel of silk and flowed into the high collar and cuffed sleeves. This created the illusion of a surcoat, when in fact the gown was self-contained. Not unlike the woman who wore the gown. Lady Bolton had worn the colors of her lord husband like armor, but she was her own woman underneath.

Sansa had worried the red and pink of House Bolton would clash horribly with her coloring, but light shades of pink and dark shades of red could be combined to flatter her auburn hair and pale complexion. Or she could wear other colors, as her lady mother did.

“I want you to reach for this puppy with your mind,” the Lady of the Dreadfort said, “you may use your hands if you think it might help you focus your magic. However, you may not leave your chair. Make her come to you.”

Sansa had tried for _hours_, while Lady Bolton sat in a chair across the room and sipped from a goblet of lemonsweet and nibbled on pieces of fresh white bread, fruit, and soft cheese. “Maybe it was a fluke,” Sansa muttered. “What happened with Florian. Maybe I’m not a skinchanger at all.”

Lady Bolton quirked one eyebrow. “One skinchanger can always sense another,” she said. “I can sense you. It feels like something is crawling over my skin.”

Sansa bit her lip to stifle her gasp, a sharp intake of breath. “I can sense you, too.”

“It wasn’t a fluke,” Lady Bolton said, a hint of bitter apology in the sweetness of her voice. “This is who you are. It’s part of you, and nothing you do can ever change that.”

Sansa wondered if Lady Bolton often told herself the same thing.

“Most skinchangers have a visual range,” Lady Bolton said, “they cannot inhabit the mind and body of something they cannot see. Unless it’s a creature they’ve bonded with. There’s a preternatural awareness that comes with a bond, one that doesn’t rely on the five ordinary senses. If your bond creature dies, you experience its death as though it were your own. Many skinchangers go mad from that. I almost did.”

Sansa frowned. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

“Because unchecked magic branches out,” Lady Bolton said, “untrained skinchangers form bonds in our dreams. I did it when I was three, much too young to understand what I was doing. Then, when I was five, I was felled by a hunter’s arrow through my eye. I died again when I was seven, by a bear’s teeth and claws. Then again by a horned owl snapping my neck. I have died four times. If you don’t learn how to control your magic, you will die over and over before your death truly comes. I hope to spare you from that pain and prepare you for the harsh realities of being a skinchanger in one fell swoop.”

Sansa had to steel herself by swallowing around the lump of fear in her throat. “How did you die the fourth time?” she asked.

Lady Bolton adjusted her thick bronze-rimmed eyeglasses, her fingers snarling anxiously. “Domeric and I visited Queenscrown four years ago,” she answered. “I was your age. Domeric was sixteen. I wanted to watch the northern lights with my flesh and blood eyes, and to stay where Good Queen Alysanne once stayed. We encountered a group of wildling raiders in the Gift. They killed Silverwing, my first yearling. House Ryswell has a tradition where each member of the family is gifted with a yearling on their second nameday, so human and horse grow up together. Domeric, Rae, Cre, Mel, and I all began learning to ride at a very young age. Those wildlings killed Domeric’s palfrey, too.”

Sansa frowned again. “What happened to the wildlings?” she asked. “How did you escape them?”

Lady Bolton inhaled sharply through her nose and sucked the flesh on the inside of her cheek in between her teeth, gnawing. “We didn’t,” she answered. “They had a knife to Domeric’s throat. They squabbled over who among them got to rape me. They liked my hair,” she tugged on a stray curl spiraling out of her braid to frame her face, “wildlings think red hair is lucky. I had to…”

Sansa wasn’t as horrified by the brutal implication as she thought a proper lady should be. Primitive men that lived beyond the Wall were wild. Northern girls were all told never to venture into the Gift alone, lest they be carried off by raiders. Lady Bolton couldn’t have reasoned with the wildlings who would have murdered Domeric and done worse to her. Sansa felt strangely numb as she looked at the woman in the chair across the room, who looked back unflinchingly.

In the stories and songs that she loved, the monsters were always vanquished by brave men. A stalwart hero. A handsome prince. A gallant knight. There were no female heroes, and “heroine” was a word for princesses and damsels who needed saving. Arya thought all of her favorite stories and songs were boring and she had asked Old Nan why girls couldn’t just save themselves, why they couldn’t be brave like Queen Nymeria or Visenya Targaryen or Jonquil Darke.

Those princesses and damsels _were_ brave, though. Daeryssa had been taken by giants, and she had survived until Serwyn had come to rescue her. Jonquil had loved her Florian even though he was a lowborn fool in armor made of motley. Elenei had used her tempestuous magic to protect the king she loved from the wrath of her parents, the sea god and the goddess of the wind. Sansa wondered if she could be brave like a lady in a song, as Lady Bolton had been. “You killed them,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

Sansa nodded once, slowly. “Good.”

* * *

Domeric hadn’t wanted to disturb Wynne and Sansa whilst they worked magic, so instead he intruded on his father. Roose was abed reading an old leatherbound tome by candlelight. Domeric recognized the copy of _Declamation of the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex_ by Maester Agrippa, one of Wynne’s favorite books. It was a text he himself had borrowed from her. “Father,” he greeted.

“Wynne is pregnant,” Roose informed him without preamble, “with twins. I know our marriage has been…” he marked the page he was on with a piece of ribbon and set the closed book aside before he folded his hands over his chest and fixed his son with his caliginous gaze, “…quite a difficult adjustment for you.”

Domeric had to stifle a snort at that understatement. Even after months of watching his father court his cousin with the intention of wedding and bedding her, it was strange to see them being married and know they were sharing a bedchamber. Domeric narrowed his eyes at the smug expression his father wasn’t bothering to conceal. Wynne, _pregnant_. Discomfort twisted in the pit of his stomach at how strange that was, but…

Wynne came from good stock. Lady Barbrey had three healthy children before her twentieth nameday. Their grandmother had borne six healthy children. Lord Willam had been an only child, but he was hale and strong until he fell in battle against the Sword of the Morning. There were no lead pipes in the Dreadfort to poison Wynne or her unborn children as his mother and brothers had been poisoned.

Domeric had been haunted by the ghosts of the brothers he should have grown up with. Wynne had siblings, but she was trueborn and they weren’t. Nothing much was expected of Cregard or Mel. He and Wynne had gravitated toward each other because they were both the sole heirs, the children born to rule—whether they wanted to or no. Despite his miscomfiture, he was happy for Wynne. Mostly. Because this was something he knew she truly wanted. If she didn’t, she would have taken all of the preventive measures that she learned from her lady mother. “Why didn’t she tell me herself?” Domeric wanted to know.

Roose tilted his head slantwise and shrugged, unflappable as ever. “Wynne thought it would be somewhat less awkward coming from me,” he said.

Domeric shook his head and scoffed. “No power on this earth is capable of making this poppycock less awkward,” he retorted.


	15. The Harvest Feast {V}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 14: The Harvest Feast {V}
> 
> Sometimes love is like having your throat slit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brokefang, Frostfur, and Rattail are named in homage to the _Immortals_ quartet by Tamora Pierce.

**It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.**

Susan Sontag, _Reborn_

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅤ ❧**

297 AC

_At Winterfell, the ancestral seat of House Stark, on the eastern edge of the wolfswood in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

It wasn’t fair.

Sansa was a skinchanger. Sansa was betrothed to Domeric Bolton, who rode like the wind and was one of the best swordsmen Arya had ever seen. Sansa was going to live at the Dreadfort with the first greenseer born in over a hundred years and learn how to fly in the skins of birds and run in the skins of wolves.

It often felt as though Arya had nothing and Sansa had everything. Sansa could sing and dance, Sansa knew how to sew and how to dress, Sansa wrote poetry and played the high harp _and _the bells. Worse, she was beautiful. Sansa had the Tully look, like all of their siblings: blue eyes, auburn hair and easy smiles, fair skin. Arya had drab brown hair, a long solemn face, dark skin and grey eyes. Lyanna did everything Sansa did, and Lorra was only two. Arya was the odd one out among her sisters. It was Jon and Aly she loved best of all. Jon had the Stark look, as she did. They had always been close, though not as close as the twins were to each other. Aly looked the way Arya had always pictured Queen Visenya Targaryen, with her pale violet eyes and silver-gold hair. Aly seemed as comfortable in ringmail as she was in silk and she was as unforgiving as Visenya had been. Aly, like Visenya, was beautiful even in her unfashionable gowns.

Lady Bolton was beautiful too. Lustrous red-gold hair fell down her back in a braid studded with jeweled pins and blooming ruse black hellebore. Lady Bolton wore a gown of black silk brocade embroidered with golden flowers over a bronze satin kirtle. Her surcoat of black velvet and gold Myrish lace was held together by five pairs of ornate brass fasteners wrought in the shape of wings, with five more smaller pairs of fastenings flying from wrist to elbow on each arm. Her neck and earlobes were adorned with rainbow obsidian cabochons set in white gold. Her skirts frothed with gold lace and bronze gossamer beneath the brocade. There was nothing of House Bolton in how she was dressed, but Roose Bolton never left her side.

No one asked her to dance because he wouldn’t let anyone else get close enough. Instead they whispered to each other as they ate, and in between each course they put down their cutlery to intertwine their fingers on top of the great oaken table. Arya frowned as her skin prickled with a strange awareness. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, but she had only ever felt so aware of her siblings before.

Father was seated at the head of the high table on the dais in the Great Hall, with Mother to his right and Sansa to his left. Domeric Bolton sat beside her, his long black hair braided at his temples and tied back with a deep red silk ribbon that matched his doublet. At his throat, a delicate white-gold brooch with red filigree in the shape of his flayed man sigil was pinned to the high collar of his black leather jerkin above the silver fastenings. Sansa looked besotted, which made Arya feel even more annoyed.

Roose Bolton sat with his son to his left and his wife to his right. Lady Bolton was seated in between her husband and grandfather, the Lord of the Rills and Warden of Blazewater Bay. Rodrik Ryswell ruled the lands from the shores of Blazewater Bay to Sea Dragon Point, and each of his three sons had a holdfast of their own. Ser Roger Ryswell was Master of Woodsedge at the edge of the wolfswood, Ser Rickard Ryswell was Master of Mundburg on the stony shores of the Sunset Sea and Ser Roose Ryswell was Master of Coldfells in the hills of the Rills. Their lady mother was a Manderly of White Harbor, so all three were anointed knights even though it was known that House Ryswell kept faith with the old gods.

Plush banners hung on the stone wall behind the dais: the fierce grey direwolf of the Starks, the sigil of the Boltons like a man dipped in blood, the crowned and crossed battle axes of the Dustins with their blades of bronze, the black horsehead of the Ryswells, the merman of Manderly brandishing his trident.

Arya knew from getting underfoot that Barbrey Dustin had once hoped to marry Uncle Brandon, who sired two bastard children on her before he died. Uncle Brandon was betrothed to Mother, and Lady Barbrey had been wed to Lord Dustin. When he died, she became the Lady of Barrowton. Domeric Bolton was half Ryswell, and the old women who worked in the kitchens said his betrothal to Sansa was meant to make up for Uncle Brandon slighting Lord Rodrik by not taking his younger daughter to wife before he took her maidenhead since Lady Barbrey had no trueborn sons for Sansa to marry.

Father never talked about her Uncle Brandon or her Aunt Lyanna, but all the grizzled old men-at-arms she had talked to said Uncle Brandon was much too hotblooded to hold Winterfell. There were those who still blamed him for the death of her grandfather. Most blamed Mad King Aerys, but some of them had said the king would’ve had no cause to execute Lord Rickard or his heir if her uncle hadn’t ridden to King’s Landing and demanded that Prince Rhaegar come out and die.

Arya thought her Uncle Brandon was brave. Prince Rhaegar had stolen her Aunt Lyanna and locked her away in a tower. Uncle Brandon had only wanted to rescue his sister.

* * *

Lord and Lady Stark rose to their feet at the second hour of the feast and silence fell in the great hall. It was piecemeal, descending bit by bit until everyone was quiet. Even the bard. Their fingers were intertwined as they stood, with no artifice in the subtle display of affection.

After the betrothal was announced, Domeric led Sansa onto the floor and led her in the first dance of the night as custom decreed. When the first song ended, other pairs joined them on the floor as the music began again. Daryn Hornwood danced with his betrothed, Alys Karstark. Cregard danced with Rae as Dacey led gelid Mel onto the floor. Robb danced with Aly, his natural sister, while her twin brother Jon danced with their sister Arya. Domeric caught sight of his father and Wynne in his periphery.

This wasn’t the first time Domeric had danced with Sansa, but he still complimented her on how elegantly she moved. Not only out of courtesy, either; he did so because he enjoyed making her smile.

Sansa turned her smile into a pout as her father asked her for the next dance. Robb was swarmed by the eligible daughters of the Stark bannermen whose fathers hoped they would become the Lady of Winterfell now that Ned had begun to arrange marriages for his brood: Jonelle Cerwyn, Agatha Umber, Gwyn Whitehill, Talia Forrester, Arsa Flint, Wynafryd and Wylla, and three Mormont girls. Domeric got ahold of Wynne and tugged her by the elbow to sit at one of the tables below the dais, her voluminous skirts puffing up around her legs as she decorously swept them beneath her knees and watched him from behind her eyeglasses with sagacious eyes. “I know things will never be the same,” he told her. “We cannot ever go riding alone or spend the night in the library voraciously reading by the light of the same candle stub.”

“We are no longer children,” Wynne agreed, “but you are my family. No matter what the future holds, that won’t ever change.”

Domeric resisted the urge to kiss her on the forehead or lean to rest his head on her shoulder as he’d done a hundred times before. It would not be proper to do so now, so instead he kept his hands to himself and smiled at her. “Congratulations,” he said.

Wynne bit her lip before her mouth bloomed into a brilliant grin. “I think you’ll make a magnificent older brother,” she told him softly, “and I would know.”

Domeric inhaled sharply as raw emotion coalesced in his throat. “Yes,” he said thickly, “you would.”

* * *

Cregard had brought more than just his wife and newborn son to Winterfell—he brought direwolves.

When her brother was a boy, he would shapechange into a wolf and he ran in the Ashwood with a pack of grey wolves. When he was eight, their mother sent him into fosterage with their Uncle Roger, who lived in a holdfast on the southwestern edge of the wolfswood at the border of Ryswell and Glover lands. When he was nine, he went running in his wolfskin and he met a pair of direwolves named Brokefang and Frostfur.

Brokefang and Frostfur had migrated south during the year of the false spring because prey was scarce in the lands beyond the Wall. Frostfur had a sister, Rattail, who perished in the northern mountains before they reached the wolfswood. Brokefang took Frostfur as his mate after Rattail died, and she was pregnant with their pups when they met Cregard.

Cregard named the pups Symeon, after the legendary Symeon Star-Eyes, and Shella, after Lady Shella from the story of the Rainbow Knight. Symeon went home with Cregard when he was only six months old, and he got so big that her brother sometimes rode him instead of a horse. No other predators dared to come anywhere near the Ryswell herds with Symeon and Shella on the prowl.

Brokefang and Frostfur had died and he had wrapped his newborn son in a wolfskin blanket. Cregard slow roasted their bodies, stripped the flesh off their skeletons, used the gamey meat as bait for bear traps, and sold the bones to potters in the Rills. It was better than leaving them to rot in the woods. Wild wolves would eat ungulates, small mammals and large rodents, fish and fowl and even carrion meat, but wolves never ate each other. In that way, they were more civilized than humans could ever be.

“If Shella has a litter,” Cregard said, “would Lady Sansa want a direwolf pup? After you teach her to warg into dogs.”

Wynne tilted her head and forced herself not to slouch in her seat. In the morning, she planned to resume teaching Sansa precisely that. “Why don’t you ask her?” she wondered.

Cregard soured as though he’d sucked on a very unripe lemon. “I’m a bastard,” he muttered. “Lady Sansa pretends we don’t exist.”

Wynne yawned into the hollow of her palm. It was now the seventh hour of the feast, and she had transcended her exhaustion and dissolved into an edentate state of lassitude that was threatening her elegant façade. Most of the Stark children had gone to bed, and the men below them on the benches were so deep in their cups that some of them had forgotten how to control the sound of their voices while others had simply fallen asleep. At the beginning of the feast, the Umbers and Karstarks in particular had been glowering in her direction—but they were much too wary of Roose to approach her and speak their minds. Roose had sipped two glasses of hippocras before he switched to water and put his hand on her thigh underneath the high table once he was finished eating; the wanton part of her wanted him to slip that hand under her skirts and touch her through her smallclothes. _If our mother had gotten everything she ever wanted_, she thought, _Cre would be the heir to Winterfell and I would be…nowhere_.

“I shall try to teach her that being a bastard does not mean you should not be treated with courtesy and respect,” she told him, even though the lesson Sansa needed to learn was that pretending an eyesore didn’t exist wasn’t going to make the unsightly thing go away. When one had the sight, being willfully blind was dangerous. It was something that Wynne herself was still in the process of learning—or _un_learning.

Cregard nodded, mollified. “I’ll come over with Ben tomorrow so you can see your nephew in the flesh,” he said before he flicked his gaze to her stomach and grinned wolfishly as his nostrils flared. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Roose said courteously. Wynne had lifted her goblet to her lips and she was in the midst of swallowing a sip of lemonsweet, unable to respond.

Cregard bowed his head obsequiously. In human flesh or wolfskin, he knew his place. There were hierarchies among every species. Neither beast nor man was exempt from the pecking order. “My lord,” he said before he rose to his feet and stalked with lupine grace to where his wife sat with her father and stepmother.

“My lady,” Roose murmured and squeezed her thigh, “shall we make ourselves scarce?”

Wynne stifled yet another yawn. “Only if you promise to let me take a nap before you attempt to seduce me again,” she whispered back.

“Of course,” Roose said and gave her an indulgent smile. It was sharp even though he didn’t bare his teeth, his pale grey eyes glittering with a warmth he never showed to anyone else.

Wynne smiled back shyly as she rose to her feet and twisted her hips to swish any crumbs out of her skirts. Then she tucked her hand in the proffered crook of his elbow, resisting the urge to lean on him in a manner that would be most improper; every muscle in her back and legs _ached_, another pregnancy symptom that she wanted to kill with fire, and her ass still felt a little sore in the aftermath of being spanked.

Roose immediately noticed how tender each step that she took was, and he quietly swept her up into his arms. Wynne blushed hot in the dark and put her arms lopsidedly around his neck as they walked past the sept and crossed from one courtyard into another. Roose was much stronger than he looked and being carried by him made her feel as though she took up exactly the right amount of space in the world instead of too much. It was a good feeling.

Wynne nuzzled his shoulder and planted a quick kiss on the side of his neck above his collar; his grip on her tightened, his fingertips digging into her waist and thigh.

“Don’t start anything you’re too tired to finish,” Roose admonished softly.

Wynne rolled her eyes at him as one of the Winterfell men-at-arms opened the door of the guesthouse for them. “Not everything is foreplay,” she informed him, “sometimes you just…want to kiss someone.”

Roose scoffed and carried her up the stairs, where a pair of Dreadfort men waited to open the door of their guestroom and would stand guard outside while they slept. “I always want to kiss you,” he said after the door had closed behind them.

Wynne kissed the underside of his jaw and felt him clench the muscles there before he lowered her to her feet, his hands lingering over her thick waist until he smoothed them up her back to her nape and unclasped her necklace. Roose smiled faintly at the soft gasp that spilled from in between her lips in response to his touch and put the opal necklace down on top of her trunk as she unfastened her surcoat and shucked the garment off. Wynne turned wordlessly as she did at the end of each day and stood with her back to him; he unlaced her gown and kirtle while she undid her braids and unpinned the hellebore from her hair.

This intimacy had grown in between them almost like a forest, every day sowing new seeds that sprouted when she wasn’t looking. Despite her powers of perception, Wynne had somehow failed to see that a marriage for personal gain was still _personal_. Now it was too late to weed out the feelings that had taken root in a heart and mind so prone to overgrowth. Wynne had known that Roose wouldn’t fall in love with her, and she had never even considered the possibility that _she_ would fall in love with _him_. But she had. At some point, she’d fallen in love with her husband. What the fuck was wrong with her?

Wynne had left the empty velvet bags and wooden coffers that contained her jewels on top of her trunk, and she put them all back inside her weirwood repository before she turned around again and saw him looking at her as though she was the most precious thing in the world. It made her breath stutter in her throat, her heart fluttering and lungs constricting until all of the air had flown out of her chest. _Don’t look at me like that_, she thought as she tried and unequivocally failed to catch her wayward breath. _Please_.

Because the only thing worse than being in love with her husband would be if he loved her in return.

Wynne held his gaze as she unfastened her garters with efficient flicks of her fingers and peeled her stockings off, her pale cheeks flushing a lovely shade of pink as she dropped the stockings and garters into a basket on top of her discarded surcoat and gown and kirtle. “I don’t have a plan,” she whispered, “not in the cohesive sense of the word. Prognostication has so many variables. I cannot see what the future holds with any semblance of accuracy because people constantly make choices that change its shape. There are over forty million people in Westeros, and they each make dozens if not hundreds of choices every day. I have things I know could go wrong and thoughts about how to either prevent them before they occur or prepare for eventualities. There are tiers. One,” she held up one finger, “the Wall. There are wildlings and white walkers and wights on one side and black brothers on the other. I predict three permutations of potential conflict: the Others against the wildlings, the Others against the Night’s Watch, and wildlings against the Night’s Watch. This could obviously be remedied if the wildlings and watchmen make peace and form an alliance in order to defeat their common enemy, but peace has never been a permanent state of affairs.”

Roose nodded and folded his arms to stop himself from touching her, from doing anything to break the spell of mundane exhaustion that had loosened her tongue. “What’s the worst-case scenario?” he asked.

Wynne muffled a yawn in the palm of one hand. “Mutually assured destruction,” she answered somnolently, “the wildlings and watchmen fight to the last man and the Others reanimate the slain, adding over a hundred thousand wights to the ranks of the army of the dead.”

“If the Wall is breached,” Roose said, “we’re all dead. Unless you’ve hatched enough dragons and gathered enough dragonriders to incinerate the Others and their wights.”

Wynne hummed, a restless sound of agreement. “Two,” she held up two fingers, “the North. We have the Lord and Lady of Winterfell on our side, which should minimize the conflicts that stem from our reputations. Robb Stark is aware of the threats beyond the Wall and even if Lord Stark dies tomorrow, the Warden of the North will still be our ally. If you attempt to stage a coup and overthrow the Starks, that would be the worst-case scenario. This kingdom would tear itself apart before you ever had a chance to rule.”

Roose exhaled a sharp breath, his nostrils flaring as his teeth clenched. This was never a game of thrones to him. It was a game of survival, and he would do whatever he felt was necessary to win. Even if that meant abandoning his ambition. Temporarily. “Stop worrying about me plotting a coup,” he told her softly. “My lust for power has its limits.”

Wynne arched her eyebrows. “Does it?” she asked him acerbically.

“Yes,” Roose said impassively, his expression cold and dispassionate even though her impertinence made him want to take her over his knee and spank her again so much he was getting hard just from thinking about it. “Marriage is the best way to form a lasting alliance. When I proposed, I was offering you my support in perpetuity. If you wanted to overthrow the Starks, I would do so in a heartbeat. However, you wish to use them and their influence to weaponize the North against a greater threat. I support that.”

Wynne arched her eyebrows higher. Then she tucked an errant curl behind her ear and smiled at him in the shy and sweet way that always made his mouth go dry and his heart clench horribly. “Three,” she held up three fingers, “the Iron Islands. Lord Balon Greyjoy wants to return to the Old Way of raiding and raping and reaving. Thralldom is not considered slavery by the ironborn, but it’s slavery. Just as ‘paying the iron price’ is another name for theft facilitated by murder. Valorizing raiding and raping and reaving is the backbone of ironborn culture. Aegon the Conqueror outlawed the stealing of women in Westeros, but ironborn men still have their salt wives. Thralls still work the land, although they’ve overmined the eponymous iron.”

“Their main export is dwindling,” Roose said. “Lord Balon knew that when he attempted to rebel against the crown eight years ago.”

Wynne hummed again. “Lord Balon had eight brothers,” she informed him, “only two of them remain among the living. Aeron Greyjoy is a Priest of the Drowned God. Victarion Greyjoy commands the Iron Fleet. Euron Greyjoy was exiled four moons ago.”

“Euron Greyjoy was killed by a flock of ravens on the mainland shores of Ironman’s Bay,” Roose murmured, “I assumed you were responsible.”

Wynne snorted. “My grandmother sank his ship and skinchanged into the unkindness of ravens that killed him and his raiders,” she clarified. “Woe betide those who trespass on Blackwood lands and disturb her knitting circle. I don’t think Lord Balon or the ironborn will become a problem unless King Robert dies, but they do have the Iron Fleet and over a thousand longships. After Lord Arryn dies and Lord Stark goes south, I expect the ironborn to invade the North. If they do, I plan to commandeer as many ships as possible and repurpose them.”

“How?” Roose wanted to know. Wynne seemed anxious, but there was no anxiety in her tone. It lurked in the way she twisted her fingers together, the way she adjusted her eyeglasses and fidgeted with her rings. Roose knew her well enough by now to understand that her nervousness stemmed not from self-doubt but from her uncertainty about the future and vexing inability to control every outcome.

Wynne smiled wider and wiggled the fingers of one hand spookily. “Magic,” she deadpanned.

Greenseers held sway over all manner of earthly things. If she could turn the wood and metal that ships were made of against their captains and crews, she could theoretically defeat any fleet singlehanded or reduce an enemy keep to rubble. Roose smiled at the implications. Such havoc she could potentially wreak. It was a shame that her sole ambition was to save herself—and save the world in the process.

Wynne popped the blades out of the ring he’d given her, a wickedly sharp slender slice of steel long enough to sever any major artery concealed on either side of the oval-cut green demantoid garnet. “Four,” she held up the fingers of her other hand, “the principality of Dorne. House Martell has been plotting treason against the crown since House Targaryen was deposed. Princess Arianne was secretly betrothed to Prince Viserys before he was assassinated.”

“Princess Rhaenys is betrothed to the crown prince,” Roose said.

“Doran Martell is planning to poison the crown prince after the marriage is consummated,” Wynne retorted, “he wants to seat Rhaenys on the Iron Throne once the king drinks and hunts and whores himself into an early grave.”

“Why do you hate the king?” Roose wanted to know. Of course there was the obvious reason, but he wondered if there wasn’t more to her disdain for Robert Baratheon. “Because your father died for him?”

“My father died for Brandon Stark,” Wynne said flatly. “Brandon was fostered at Barrow Hall. My father was an only child, so Brandon and Addam were the closest thing he ever had to brothers. When he went to war, he did so because he wanted to avenge someone he loved the way that I love Domeric. I cannot blame him for that, even though I resent him for not coming home. My mother’s heart is broken forever and I can never forgive him for that. I love him. I hate him. I miss him—” her long eyelashes softly fluttered against her cheeks like the wings of a captive bird as her unshed tears seeped into her voice, “—and it hurts to feel so much for someone I will never know. But that isn’t why I hate the king. I hate him because I find his incompetence abhorrent.”

“I see.” Roose kept his arms folded and his feet planted where he stood, even though every instinct that he possessed was screaming at him to go to her. “Come here,” he whispered to her instead.

Wynne obeyed with a sharp intake of breath and a sob, and he took her into his arms. Roose had made her come so hard she cried from sheer pleasure and he’d fucked her throat so deeply that she gagged on his cock and teared up involuntarily, but he’d never seen her weep before. Wynne made everything that was cold and vicious in him thaw and sweeten, and he hated how utterly helpless her tears made him feel. There was nothing he could do but hold her while she cried and clung to him. Wynne sniffled and held her eyeglasses in between her teeth by the temple tip while she procured a handkerchief to wipe her swollen eyes and sweep the dribbles of snot away from her pert delicate nose, her eyelashes clumped like wet feathers. “May we go to sleep now?” she asked him, her soft voice raw from weeping.

“Of course.” Roose bent to kiss her cheek and tasted the lachrymose sheen of salt on her skin, lingering to drag his nose up the curve of her forehead.

Then he went to blow out all the candles and left the firewood piled in the hearth unlit. After all, you never knew who might be watching you through the flames.


	16. The Company of Wolves {I}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 15: The Company of Wolves {I}
> 
> Sansa is escorted to the Dreadfort, where the Boltons are preparing for a long winter.

**But the wolves have ways of arriving at your own hearthside. We try and try but sometimes we cannot keep them out.**

Angela Carter, _The Company of Wolves_

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅤⅠ ❧**

297 AC

_On the Redroad, a road branching off from the Kingsroad from Winterfell to the Dreadfort in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

Sansa had never left Winterfell before. If she went beyond the castle walls, it was only to visit Winter Town on market day. Arya would tear through the muddy streets like a wild thing whilst she walked sedately with their lady mother and longed for masked balls and grand tournaments and mummer shows. It was all she could do to keep her skirts out of the muck.

Domeric had told her that a masquerade was held at the Dreadfort every year in honor of the festival of Samhuinn that began on the last day of Blood Moon and ended on the second day of Oak Moon. Sansa was thrilled at the prospect of attending the festivities with him in a moonturn hence, and she was already fantasizing about the gown she would sew for the occasion.

When she left, she did not look back even though she knew her mother and father were standing at the gate watching her go. Sansa knew she would see them again soon. In two months she would celebrate her nameday, and they had promised to attend the celebration at the Dreadfort.

Lyanna bit her lip until she bled in a futile attempt to stop herself from crying as Domeric gallantly handed Sansa into the wheelhouse, after Lord and Lady Bolton were already inside. Arya sulked the whole time and refused to look at her, only to mutter something under her breath about not missing her perfect sister at all. _Fine_, Sansa had thought with a huff, _I won’t miss you either_. Bran and Rickon had hugged her so tightly that tears pricked hot at the corners of her eyes. Lorra wasn’t old enough to understand the significance of Sansa leaving, but she had said goodbye and waved to her with both arms and a wide smile on her plump face. Aly, of course, had made herself scarce as her half-sister always did.

Sansa took utmost care to sweep her skirts beneath her once she had sat in the wheelhouse in between Jeyne and Lord Bolton, across from three ladies-in-waiting. Its exterior was made of dark polished wood, the interior embellished with plush red velvet cushioning on the seats and even the walls. There were black velvet curtains on the windows opposite the door, overlooking a compartment in between the seats in which a featherbed pallet had been packed. Atop it sat a huge wicker basket filled with skeins of yarn in all manner of colors.

It was strange to sit beside the Lord of the Dreadfort. Roose Bolton was impassive and intimidating despite his perfect courtesy. Domeric was handsome where his father was plain. There was nothing unpleasant about his face, but for his pale grey eyes. In the North, that shade of grey was known as ghost grey. Lord Bolton possessed a bone-chilling presence that struck fear in the hearts of everyone who encountered the Leech Lord. It was something quiet and quite sinister that he could not hide even with the most immaculate courteousness. Wynne didn’t seem frightened of him in the slightest, however. One of his arms was draped possessively around her, his thumb idly stroking the exposed skin at the neckline of her gown where her neck swooped into the hunch of her shoulder. Wynne had leaned her head on his shoulder, nestling into him as her knitting hooks meticulously clicked and clacked in her hands.

Sansa watched the Lady of the Dreadfort and her three ladies-in-waiting knit squares of colorful yarn while the wheelhouse rumbled over the road, even as Lady Kenna Holt complained that she was all thumbs with every purl. It wasn’t possible to do fine work like needlepoint in a moving wheelhouse, but squares that would be knitted into a vibrant patchwork blanket were another story. Some of the squares bore a knitted sigil, while others were block squares in solid colors and horizontal stripes. How strange it was to see the flayed man of House Bolton rendered in pink and red yarn. Sansa had to admire such detailed craftsmanship, even if the sigil itself was grim and grisly.

Lady Bolton was never idle, Sansa had noticed. If she was seated then she was eating, reading a book, writing a letter, holding a conversation, knitting or sewing. Elsewise, she was gathering herbs or checking the shoes on the horses or grinding plants into powder to make sachets of tea. In one of the many pockets hidden in the lining of her skirts, Wynne kept a small leatherbound notebook where she wrote all of her recipes. Some of the concoctions she mixed were medicinal, herbal remedies for smallfolk with chronic pain and other conditions. Others were simply hot or cold tea recipes with notes on what refreshments would complement them.

Jeyne was only the daughter of a steward, but she was prone to acting far above her station. It was considered proper for a lady to sit at embroidery and even sew clothes for her lord husband or her children, but a lady did not weave or knit. Thus, she wrinkled her nose at the knitting.

Lady Bolton, whose eerie hazel eyes missed nothing, tilted her chin in a manner that reminded Sansa of the fierce look Arya wore before she did something willful. On her it was less mulish and more formidable, because Sansa knew the Lady of the Dreadfort had killed people before. In her eyes was eminence, the sort of aplomb and arcane power that could sink tendrils into stone and crack the earth open. “This summer has lasted a decade,” Wynne informed Jeyne, “winter shall last as long. If not longer. Lady Agnes Blackwood, my grandmother, held a weekly knitting circle at Barrow Hall for years before she returned to Raventree after my father died. It was she who taught me how to knit, in fact. Bolton lands are less centralized than Barrowton so holding a knitting circle at the Dreadfort is unfeasible, but people can always use extra blankets and quilts. We’re also knitting cloaks, scarves, gloves, mittens, tunics, coats, and hats. I am to be confined to a wheelhouse for a sennight, when I would much prefer to ride on horseback like a proper Ryswell. Why should I not spend my time doing something productive?”

Jeyne flushed with embarrassment, her cheeks and neck turning pink. “It’s unladylike,” she mumbled.

Wynne snorted. “I am a highborn lady whether I like it or no,” she pointed out, not unkindly. “Therefore, everything I do is ladylike. If you don’t want to knit, I won’t force you. However, please do me and my ladies the courtesy of not turning your snobbish nose up at our efforts.”

Sansa was mortified, for what Jeyne said had reflected poorly on her. “Oh, please forgive her, Lady Bolton,” she begged. “Jeyne didn’t mean anything—”

Wynne put down her knitting in order to adjust her eyeglasses with two fingertips. “I do not feel slighted,” she said, “I simply want to disabuse you of the notion that ladies shouldn’t do certain things without questioning it. Why is knitting unladylike? Why is being outspoken unladylike? Why is training at arms unladylike? Why can’t women obtain knighthood or study at the Citadel? Why can’t noblewomen bathe or dress ourselves? Why can’t women choose their own husbands? Why haven’t the Seven Kingdoms ever had a queen regnant? Why does the Faith always have a high septon, but never a high septa? Why do men write more books than women? Why do sons always inherit before daughters, even though daughters are sometimes born ahead of them in the line of succession? Why do men set the standards for how all women are meant to behave? I will not ask you to blindly agree with everything I say. There is no place in my household for lickspittles. I only ask that you think critically about something before you espouse it. Words can bind us like chains, whether your tongue is sharp as steel or glossy as silver or dull as lead.”

Sansa was much too well-bred to gape, but still her eyes widened as she peeked over her shoulder at her wardeness. It would never have occurred to her to ask such questions, but now she couldn’t help but wonder. Sansa frowned as her mind spun like thread from a spool of embroidery silk, every preconceived notion discreetly beginning to unravel. “Because those men don’t want us taking power away from them,” she whispered more to herself than anyone else in the wheelhouse.

Lord Bolton chuckled. “Smart girl,” he whispered back.

* * *

_At the Red Cock Inn, in the village of Furzeton, near the Redroad_

* * *

Since the population of the North was sprawled over a vast wilderness the size of the six more populous mainland kingdoms south of the Neck combined, lodgings were scarce outside of cities and castle towns. Each village near the Redroad that branched off from the Kingsroad and ended at the Holt Tower on the banks of the Weeping Water converged upon a village square, where dwellings were built and wells had been dug. There were small inns whose customers were usually wandering journeymen or peddlers in every village, and Wynne had sent a raven that could speak ahead to inform the innkeepers their lord and lady would be coming. This inn, like the other dwellings in the village square, was built on a lattice of wattle and daub reinforced with sturdier wood. There was a tavern attached to the kitchen from which the smell of rich onion stew wafted. Its roof was shingled, not thatched. Unlike the other buildings, the inn was constructed with three gables, one that faced northward while the others faced east and west. There were ten rooms for guests, five on each floor. It would be cozy at night with two or three or people sleeping in each of the rooms.

Their smallfolk were not poor. Each cottage in the center of the square was old but well-kept, as were the newer dwellings that surrounded them. Roose was cruel, but he wasn’t a bad ruler. Bolton land was truly a peaceful land, populated by a quiet people. Especially since they weren’t living in fear any longer. Their clothes and shoes were of good quality cotton, leather, wool and flax adorned with embroidery stitched in cotton or linen thread. When the wheelhouse rolled into the village square, the chief of the village came to greet them while children too young to work in the fields gathered around without regard for deference or what constituted a respectful distance. There was no sickness here, and no starvation.

Wynne had seen all of that in the greenscape and in the flesh traveling back and forth between the Barrowlands, the Dreadfort and Winterfell, but Sansa was seeing it all for the first time. Someday this would be her land. These people would be her people.

It was blatantly obvious that her parents had sheltered her. Sansa was quite well-spoken and well-behaved, but the mud beneath her feet distressed her enough that her brow furrowed with every step as they walked from the wheelhouse to the entrance of the small inn. When things weren’t nice and pretty, she felt out of sorts.

_When I was her age_, Wynne thought, _I was sleeping on patches of moss beneath the stars and burying my own shit in the dirt. Ned Stark did his children no favors by sheltering them_.

Although she understood why he had done so. Eddard was haunted by the rebellion, the war he waged against the mad king who tortured and murdered his father and brother with impunity. When he broke his oath and slew the king, Jaime Lannister had robbed him of his justice. Eddard didn’t know about the caches of wildfire hidden all over King’s Landing. Jaime had never told anyone, because no one had ever bothered to ask him why he killed the king. Eddard only knew what he saw after the red cloaks had sacked King’s Landing: the Young Lion seated on the Iron Throne in his golden armor, his white cloak stained with the blood of the king to whom he had sworn his sword.

Lyanna had died in a bed of roses, the bloodred petals blackened with decay. Eddard had buried his sister in the crypts beneath Winterfell beside their brother, father and mother. Benjen had left to join the Night’s Watch a fortnight after his brother returned to Winterfell, dressed all in the black of mourning. It would be the only color he wore until his watch had ended.

No one in the North had forgotten that Ned Stark had been a green boy when he went to war and won, thereby avenging his family and overthrowing a tyrannical king. Wynne didn’t need greensight to see that he coddled his children because he was orphaned and lost two siblings, the woman he had hoped to marry, and their daughter within the same year when he was her age. If Lyanna had never been fostered with their aunt at Amberly, she might not have met Rhaegar when he was fourteen and she was nine. If he’d never brought Robert’s suit to Lord Rickard, Lyanna might not have absconded with Rhaegar and Brandon might have lived to take his rightful place as the Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North. If Brandon hadn’t been murdered, her father might have lived to return home as he’d promised her mother and hold his daughter in his arms. Ned Stark blamed himself for what had become of them all, and he believed that he was undeserving of the love and happiness he had found with his wife and their pack of wolf children.

While she wasn’t above taking advantage of his guilt to manipulate Eddard, Wynne highly doubted that his elder brother would’ve made a better liege or father, and it wasn’t just because he had used her mother so ill. Brandon was selfish and brash. Diplomacy bored him, and he was happiest on horseback or with a blade in his hand. Peacetime would have grated on him like fingernails on slate. There was no doubt that Brandon would’ve shirked his seigniorial duties, foisting them all onto Eddard as Robert had foisted his royal duties onto Jon Arryn. Catelyn Tully would’ve never been happy in a marriage to a man like Brandon, with his wandering eyes and wandering hands. Wynne had seen the other bastard children he’d fathered on peasant girls in the Rills and in Barrowton in the greenscape, none of whom had survived the winter of 280 AC. Brandon hadn’t cared one whit about them or her siblings.

Robert Baratheon had at least acknowledged his only highborn bastard, Edric Storm. Brandon Stark hadn’t even bothered.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Roose whispered after she flopped unceremoniously onto the featherbed.

Wynne scoffed. “My thoughts are worth much more than a mere copper,” she retorted before she relented. “Sansa is sheltered—a true summer child. We must be on our best behavior while she is at the Dreadfort.”

Roose understood that she meant _No flaying, elsewise Lord Eddard will undoubtedly hear of it. Please do not give our liege any reason to break this betrothal_. “Of course,” he said.

Wynne knew him well enough by now to know he would immensely enjoy pushing the boundary she had set. “If you do get caught,” she informed him, “I won’t hesitate to throw you to the wolves.”

“Nor would I expect anything less of you.” Roose grinned at her. “My ruthless little wife.”

Wynne blushed at the way his quiet deep voice caressed every word. It was mortifying how very aware of him she was, how visceral her response to even his utterance had become. Wynne had always been afraid to reveal her true nature, even in the company of the ones who loved her best. Or perhaps especially to the ones she loved the most, because she never wanted them to look at her and see a monster. Roose saw her for what she was and he liked what he saw. It was unnerving when he looked at her as though he were taking her apart, stripping bare every secret with methodical determination. 

Now he was under her skin and deep in her heart, and she had no desire to uproot him. Wynne also wasn’t foolish enough to expect him to reciprocate her feelings, but hope was more dangerous than any weapon ever wielded. False hope was even moreso. Roose wasn’t capable of being in love, but he was uncharacteristically fond of her. It would have to suffice.

* * *

Sansa had always hated riding. All it did was get her soiled and sore and sweaty, and why anyone would ride when they could recline on pillows and eat cakes eluded her.

Alas, her betrothed was half Ryswell and that meant he was half a horse. Domeric had asked her to go riding with him before the evening meal, and she had accepted. Sansa couldn’t bring herself to tell him that she thought horses were smelly and stables were filled with manure and flies, so when she went riding she liked to have the boy saddle her mount for her and bring the beast out into the yard. Domeric was accustomed to saddling his own mount and taking care of his own tack. All of the Ryswell children received a yearling when they were two and learned to ride and care for horses and riding gear from then on, until it became ingrained within them.

Worse, Robb and Jon had insisted on accompanying her even though she wanted to be alone with her betrothed. Jeyne knew better, and she had remained at the inn. Wynne rode with them, her long red-gold hair unbound and tangling in the wind. It braided itself after they came upon a thicket and she dismounted to gather herbs and pick berries. Wynne had worn an unadorned black cotton tunic and undyed doeskin breeches rather than a riding gown, the better to mount a horse or dig in the dirt. From her saddle hung a weirwood longbow to match the quiver of bone white arrows fletched with shiny black raven feathers slung across her back, sturdy leather saddlebags, and wicker baskets lined with undyed roughspun cloth. Sansa didn’t know what half the plants she gathered were. Only the wildflowers, because her mother had given her a beautifully embossed book detailing the language of flowers on her last nameday.

In the Reach, bouquets and floral arrangements were often used to declare romantic intentions and sent as responses to romantic overtures. Wynne had worn hellebore in her hair at the harvest feast. Those dark blooms were hybrids that she undoubtedly cultivated herself. Sansa idly wondered if she knew hellebore meant wit or protection from anxiety.

Domeric gently splayed his hands over her waist to help her dismount, lifting her as though she were light as a feather. It was over too soon. Sansa felt bereft, her cheeks flushed and skin tingling where his strong fingers and warm palms had touched her through her clothes.

When she asked her father why he hadn’t betrothed her to anyone, he told Sansa that someday he would make her a match with a lord. Someone worthy of her. Someone gentle and brave and strong. Someone like Domeric.

Sansa had been in love twice before, with a handsome guardsman named Alyn who hoped to become a knight one day and with Ser Waymar Royce. Alyn had been her Florian, but she had known her lord father would never allow her to marry a commoner as Jonquil had. Ser Waymar had joined the Night’s Watch, and the men of the Night’s Watch couldn’t marry. If she had made her feelings known, her love for each of them would have ended in heartbreak.

It was ever so tragic, like in the songs and stories.

Domeric was another story altogether. Someday they would be married, and then she would be his lady and wife and mother to his children. Although they would not be married for years and years, Sansa felt as though she could hardly wait.

Wynne abruptly stopped plucking comfrey plants from the earth and hunched over to vomit in the dirt, the regurgitated sounds that slithered out of her mouth nauseating in and of themselves. Sansa wrinkled her nose as her stomach began to churn in sympathy. Wynne groaned softly, her back and shoulders hunched like gnarled roots.

Domeric took a jug of water out of his saddlebags while Robb offered her a linen handkerchief. “Why do people call it morning sickness when it oft lasts into the afternoon?” he wondered.

Sansa blinked. “You’re pregnant?” she blurted.

Wynne dabbed at her mouth with the handkerchief and swirled a mouthful of water before she delicately spat it out, the fingers and palm of her other hand cradling her stomach. “Because it starts in the morning,” she informed Domeric before she answered Sansa. “Yes, I’m pregnant. With twins.”

Robb frowned. “You can’t be that far along,” he said, “how do you know it’s twins?”

Wynne held up one hand and wiggled her fingers spookily. “Magic,” she deadpanned.

Jon chuckled softly. “Wynne dreamed of leeches,” he said, “that’s how she knows it’s twins.”

Sansa was much too well-bred to gawk at her half-brother, but it was a near thing. Jon _never_ made japes. Sansa giggled and wished for a moment that Arya were here with her, but waved such thoughts away before they spoiled her mood.

Robb laughed and took his soiled handkerchief from her, tucking it back inside the pocket of his overtunic. “Congratulations,” he said.

Wynne thanked him before she picked a wild mint leaf and popped it daintily into her mouth, sucking on the leaf instead of chewing.

“Mint flowers signify protection from illness or warm feelings,” Sansa elucidated, “comfrey flowers signify returning home, barberry flowers signify a sharpness of temper, and thistle flowers signify nobility or austerity.”

Domeric picked a cluster of mint flowers and offered them to her with a gallant flourish of his strong arm. “I mean for this to signify warm feelings,” he told her with a dashing grin. “Although protection from illness cannot hurt.”

Sansa was struck dumb for a moment by his gallantry before she remembered his mother, Lady Bethany, had died of summer fever seven years ago. “I’ll treasure these,” she evinced as she thought, _as I treasure every moment spent with you_.

* * *

Domeric wore the crown that Sansa had fashioned of white comfrey flowers and bright pink snapdragons during the evening meal. Wynne had felled a pair of partridges and four hares, small game she traded to the cook at the inn’s tavern in exchange for making the berries she picked into jam.

Odilia was a thickset woman in her fifties with long wiry grey hair she kept in a neat braid; she and her paramour, Cedany, owned the inn and tavern. Their romantic entanglement was perhaps the worst kept secret in the village, although some preferred to pretend they were mere spinsters. Odilia had made a meatless onion stew, a medley of roasted vegetables, and peppery potato pies along with the meat dishes because she knew Wynne had dietary restrictions.

There had been flooding along the Weeping Water because of summer snowmelt, but the smallfolk had the sense to build their grain stores far enough from the riverbank that no one had lost what they harvested. Roose had spoken with the village leader about building more grain stores in preparation for a long winter. Wynne plotted their routes so they spent the night in every village on their way to and from Winterfell and she had calculated how much it would cost to build two additional subterranean grain stores in every village, each meant to contain five years’ worth of grain.

Airtight underground grain storage minimized loss of grain due to mold or pest contamination. If the smallfolk planted rosemary, sage, lavender, oregano, garlic, peppermint, onions, marigolds, or daffodils aboveground, those plants would keep rodents away. Steel was expensive, but they could afford it. No other sort of heavy metal would do, since iron by itself was much too brittle and lead was poisonous. Wynne had brought over glassblowers and glaziers from Myr to build more glass gardens at the Dreadfort as well, so the castle and smallfolk in the castle town would have vegetables all through winter. Anything was possible if you had the coin to make it so.

Wynne stifled a yawn as she flipped to another page in her notebook, the one where she had scrawled a recipe for comfrey salve and notes on how to prepare the roots and leaves of the plant (_roots: sliced thin, dried, and crushed into powder, best gathered in the aftermath of a frost or after the first shoots emerge from the soil; leaves: fresh ones can be applied topically or dried in bunches and rehydrated, best gathered during the flowering_).

It was a lady’s duty to monitor the stores of food and medicine in her keep. One of the changes she had made was hiring the daughters of the smallfolk in the castle town surrounding the Dreadfort as couriers who delivered the medicines and herbal teas she made to smallfolk throughout Bolton lands. Those peasant girls were trained in self-defense, armed with daggers, and guarded by men of the castle guard who knew better than to rape someone under the protection of their lady during their deliveries. Most of the men who lived in the castle town became members of the castle guard, so their own fathers or brothers or male cousins often guarded the girls. Other female townsfolk had been tasked with pickling and jellying and weaving blankets and bandages, while the male townsfolk built a smokehouse for meat and cheese and weatherproofed dwellings and chopped firewood that would be stored for winter. Younger children helped by gathering baskets of pinecones to use as kindling.

Some had complained that such work could wait until summer ended, though not where Roose might hear. Wynne took all such complaints as harmless gainsaying, not dissent. Most gainsayers were all talk, and silencing them was overkill. It wasn’t as though she were overworking them. Two hours of chopping logs in addition to four hours of guard duty instead of six hours of guard duty wasn’t overwork, especially since the guardsmen at the Dreadfort never had to actually defend the castle.

Domeric and Roose trained with the off-duty guardsmen every day in the double-bladed Bolton style of sword and dagger. Wynne preferred ranged weaponry to close combat, but their swordsmanship had a brutal sort of beauty that enthralled her. Domeric elegantly spun and swung whilst Roose parried and slashed, each strike fast and playful as though he was toying with his opponent. Roose feinted kicks and elbow strikes that always made Domeric flinch and chastised his son for assuming that enemies he may one day face would be chivalrous enough to fight with blades only.

_Wars are ugly_, Roose said every time he sent Domeric sprawling in the dirt by sweeping his feet out from under him or kicking him in the knee. _On the battlefield, it doesn’t matter how pretty your swordsmanship is. There’s no such thing as fighting dirty, only fighting like you want to live and fighting like you want to die. If you have anything to live for, I suggest you fight like a Bolton_.

Roose peered at her notebook as she chewed on her lower lip. “What is kazol?” he asked, reading the recipe on the opposite page.

“It’s a Lengii wound dressing,” Wynne informed him, “made of lees from wine casks, eggs, flour and water. Since lees are thrown out in the aftermath of racking unless the flavor of the wine specifically calls for lees—as with sparkling wine and some varieties of white wine—using them to make a wound dressing is efficient. Mayseline gives me the wine lees from her vineyard at Darkdell, from the casks of wine made from the blackbird grapes she grows.”

Roose smiled and squeezed her knee underneath the table. “How very useful,” he said, his approval of her evident in his voice. “Otter pelts make a good wound dressing as well, since they contain oils that stop blood flow.”

This method of wound dressing was used to prolong the lives of flayed prisoners during torture and interrogation, after their flesh had been stripped away. Roose had learned to flay by skinning animals first.

Wynne flipped her notebook closed with a flick of her fingers, another yawn burgeoning in the back of her throat; she muffled it with the back of one hand and reached out to caress the sharp line of his jaw with the other, his skin rough with stubble that rasped under her fingertips as he held her gaze. It was all she could do not to look away from him as her pulse spiked and something intolerably soft and warm bloomed in her chest. _I love you_, she thought but did not speak aloud, and smiled back in spite of herself.


	17. The Company of Wolves {II}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Chapter 16: The Company of Wolves {II}
> 
> Jon begins to get comfortable in his own skin, Wynne ruminates on the history of Harrenhal, and Sansa begins to adjust to life at the Dreadfort.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the Middle Ages, flat glass was typically made by cutting huge rondels of crown glass into geometric shapes or blowing huge cylinders of glass that could be cut open, flattened, and then cut into panes. Since the process for making float glass sheets wasn’t perfected until the early twentieth century, this could be considered anachronistic. However, the world of _ASoIaF_ isn’t the real world, so I do what I want. I do have more than arbitrary reasons for this: I think having prolonged seasons would impact when things were invented, even though it doesn’t seem to significantly impact growth cycles for plants or estrous cycles for mammals.

**Do not fear the dark.**  
**Instead, awaken the sleeping wolf inside you**  
**and welcome the night like it is home.**

Nikita Gill, “Do Not Fear the Dark”

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅤⅠⅠ ❧**

297 AC

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

Life at the Dreadfort wasn’t as grim or gruesome as what Old Nan’s stories had led him to believe. There was a bustling castle town built around the fortress teeming with artisans, craftsmen, armorers, scullions, laundresses, fishwives and rag and bone men. Its streets were paved with blocks of stone made of dark red clay worn pale and pink over time, with redder stone added where blocks had broken or cracked and couldn’t be repaired with mortar. Atop the battlements of the castle were triangular merlons that bared themselves like sharp black teeth. Its towers were massive, thirteen in all: one at each corner of the walls that surrounded the outer and inner courtyards and five in the castle, one at each corner of the main keep with a wider one in the center. Atop the center tower flew the flayed man of House Bolton and Wynne’s personal coat of arms, the crowned and crossed battle axes of House Dustin on green instead of gold. Domeric’s personal coat of arms, the flayed man quartered with the horsehead of House Ryswell in red in honor of his mother, flew below them. Crenellated stone walkways guarded by men in black halfhelms and pink cloaks branched out diagonally between them, from the outer towers to the upper ward of the castle. There was a wide deep moat dug around the outermost walls enclosing the fortress and separating the Dreadfort from the castle town, the parapets and corbels of the battlements fortified with machicolations and embrasures in addition to catapults and scorpions. _Bolton_ was a name derived from words that meant “enclosed house” in the Old Tongue. Their castle embodied that nomenclature.

In all of history, no army had ever breached the thick stone walls of the Dreadfort. Harlon Stark had laid siege to the fortress centuries ago. It had taken the King in the North two years to starve them out, and he made the only daughter of the lord who rose against him Queen in the North in the aftermath. Their eldest son, Brandon Stark, was known as King Ice Eyes. Arsa Stark, a younger sister of Lord Beron Stark, had married the Lord of the Dreadfort five generations back. There had been no intermarriage between House Stark and House Bolton since then.

After he dismounted, he turned and watched the Lord and Lady of the Dreadfort emerge from the wheelhouse. As they did, their servants and smallfolk bowed or knelt to welcome them back home before they promptly resumed their duties once permitted to do so. Jon handed over the reins of his mount to a stableboy while Domeric handed Sansa out of the wheelhouse and Robb offered his hand to Jeyne.

Bertram Waterman, whose surname and petty lordship were bestowed upon him by his wife, took command of the servants and porters who unloaded their bags and trunks from the wheelhouse and their packhorses. House Waterman had small holdings in Ethering on the bank of the Weeping Water, hence their sigil of crossed oars between a pair of blue flaunches. Bertram was Lord Bolton’s steward, the fourth son of a wealthy merchant from Gulltown in the Vale and Lady Alethea Arryn. House Arryn of Gulltown was a cadet branch of House Arryn of the Eyrie, one that had intermarried with merchants for generations and were deemed uncouth by their highborn cousins.

House Bolton had close ties to the Vale through marriage. Lord Bolton’s sister Lady Roxane was Lady of Runestone, the wife of Bronze Yohn Royce and mother to his five children: Ser Andar Royce, the heir to Runestone, who had wed Lady Jocelyn Templeton and fathered three children with her, Lady Ryella Royce, wife of Ser Arwood Frey and mother to his four children, Ser Robar Royce, Ser Waymar Royce, a ranger who died beyond the Wall three moonturns ago, and Lady Ysilla Royce. Lord Horton Redfort had four grown sons, two by Lord Bolton’s sister Lady Rhonda. Domeric had been fostered at the Redfort to strengthen those ties after his aunt had died of childbed fever.

Lord Bolton had close ties to House Ryswell and House Dustin, ties he strengthened by marrying Wynne. Through her, House Bolton had ties to House Manderly, to House Blackwood and House Whent in the Riverlands, and to House Tyrell and House Vyrwel in the Reach. Now that Sansa was a ward of House Bolton, two families that had warred against each other for thousands of years were joined by fosterage. After her sixteenth nameday, their houses would be joined in marriage. Jon began to see a pattern taking shape, one being meticulously woven by a greenseer.

_Wynne is consolidating her power with the Dreadfort as her power base_, he thought, _while preventing House Bolton from making trouble for House Stark and potentially weakening the position of the entire North before the Long Night begins again_.

In the inner courtyard, glassblowers and glaziers were assembling a row of glass gardens by making glass and fitting the finished panes into ornate steel frames. These were clear glass panes worth their weight in spice, the best that gold could buy.

“I brought them over from Myr,” Wynne informed him when she caught him looking, “freed them all from slavery and offered them shops of their own with enough coin for them to take on apprentices.”

Jon smiled as comprehension dawned, sharp and bright. This was exactly the sort of thing he might’ve done, if he’d been given any semblance of authority. “So,” he said, “in ten years the best glass in the Seven Kingdoms will come from the North. Not from across the Narrow Sea.”

“Yes,” Lord Bolton said, “our glassmakers already have over half a hundred orders to fill after the glass gardens have been constructed.”

Wynne smiled back at Jon as Lord Bolton proprietarily splayed one hand at the small of her back. “Most of them are small orders,” she explained, “jars and bottles, tableware and windowpanes, the bread and butter of glassmakers. While they’re making clear float glass, the glassblowers and their apprentices can fill the small orders. Sheets of glass are typically made by floating molten glass on beds of molten tin inside a furnace, to make the panes evenly thick and flat. Then it’s removed from the furnace and annealed—cooled very slowly—to release the pressure in the glass and trimmed with glass cutters.”

“Why use tin?” asked Jon. When he began training at arms, he learned by fighting with a wooden staff before he forged the practice sword and dagger he used. Ser Rodrik had explained that one must learn how to make weapons before one learned how to wield them. It was useful to know how a thing was made.

Wynne shrugged, birdlike. “I’ve seen other alloys with low melting points used,” she informed him, “particularly lead. However, lead is poisonous. While tin has low toxicity, at least for humans and animals.”

“It’s highly toxic to plants,” Domeric chimed in. “Wynne ordered the glaziers to turn the sides with tin residue facing outward so that won’t impact the plants grown in the glass gardens.”

Sansa eyed the glass gardens with plants growing inside them. “Do you grow lemons here?” she asked, her eyes alight at the prospect of lemon cakes. Jon smiled again, ducking his head as if to hide it before he remembered Lady Catelyn wasn’t here to reproach him.

“Yes,” said Wynne as servants dressed in Bolton liveries opened the doors of the entrance hall. “I graft branches from lemon trees onto hardier bush lemon shrubs. Their rootstock is what makes it possible for your gardeners at Winterfell to grow lemon trees in our climate, with cions from plants typically grown in warmer environments. I asked the cook to prepare a peach lemon butter cake for tonight’s feast, since your favorite dessert is lemon cakes and Domeric’s is peach rose tarts. In the Reach, it’s called paradise cake.”

* * *

In the hour before the feast, Wynne took a hot bath and changed into clean smallclothes and a cotton shift that she often used as a nightdress before she read through all of the correspondence that had piled up during the journey to Winterfell and back again. Most of the correspondence was from the merchants in Pentos, Qohor, Lorath, Myr and Lys to whom she was one of the benefactors who funded their guilds and reaped the profits from their investments updating her on their quarterly earnings and what percentage of those sums belonged to her.

Maester Uthor and Maester Tybald had left her personal correspondence unopened at her request. One letter was from her mother. Another was from Mel, a third from her cousin and goodsister Raelyne, a fourth from Tyta at Mundburg and a fifth from Alyx at Coldfells. There were three letters from Raventree: one from her grandmother, two from her cousins Hoster and Brynden. Hoster was perhaps her favorite of her Blackwood cousins, because he was almost as well-read as she was; he would be even moreso, if only he had the coin to buy as many books as she did. When the clarity of the history books he read became the fog of legend, he asked her for the facts. After she penned her responses and sealed them all with the pink wax of House Bolton, she opened the message from Harrenhal.

Lady Wynafrei Frey, the wife of Ser Danwell Frey, had died without issue. Which made sweet Lady Shella the last of her line. Lady Shella was a widow past sixty, postclimacteric and thus far too old to remarry in order to produce a new heir. Since her daughter had died childless and none of her sons had issue, Lady Shella had no choice but to name someone else as her successor.

Harrenhal was something of a white elephant: far too big to garrison effectively and much too expensive to maintain. According to legend, the castle was cursed and haunted by the ghosts of Harren the Black and his sons, who perished when Aegon the Conqueror and Balerion the Black Dread burned Harrenhal and extinguished their line. Harren Hoare was the last of the ironborn Kings of the Isles and the Rivers, the namesake of the castle who beggared two kingdoms to build its monstrous towers and great keep. Aegon the Conqueror raised the Valyrian master-at-arms from Dragonstone to a lord, thereby founding House Qoherys, who held Harrenhal for three generations before Lord Gargon was castrated and murdered by the father of a peasant girl he raped and deflowered in 37 AC. Good Queen Alysanne used his case to argue for the abolishment of the first night right decades later.

Roose was lucky no one had attempted to castrate him.

Harrenhal passed to House Harroway until Maegor the Cruel slaughtered them after his second wife, Queen Alys Harroway, gave birth to a monstrosity in 44 AC. Maegor raised Ser Walton Towers to a lord after he fought and slew two-and-twenty other knights in a melee fought in the streets of Lord Harroway’s Town, but he succumbed to his wounds from the melee within a fortnight and was succeed by his son. Lord Jordan Towers had a son whom he named Maegor, who died in 61 AC.

Queen Rhaena Targaryen, who took up residence in the Widow’s Tower after the death of her daughter Aerea in 56 AC and befriended the sickly Maegor Towers, held Harrenhal as its lady until her own death in 73 AC. Harrenhal passed to House Strong, who held the castle until Lord Larys Strong was executed during the Hour of the Wolf in 131 AC. Ser Simon Strong had surrendered the castle to Daemon Targaryen, the husband of Queen Rhaenyra, but he was killed by Prince Aemond Targaryen after the greens reclaimed the castle from the blacks. Alys Rivers, the Witch Queen, claimed she was the widow of Prince Aemond—who died in the Battle Above the Gods Eye—in the aftermath of the Dance of the Dragons and held Harrenhal from 131 AC until 151 AC.

Aegon the Dragonbane raised Ser Lucas Lothston, the grandson of a hedge knight, to a lord after his nephew Aegon—the prince who later reigned as Aegon the Unworthy—was caught abed with Lady Falena Stokeworth. Ser Lucas was married to Lady Falena and gifted with Harrenhal as a pretext to remove her from court. Then, during the reign of Maekar the Anvil, Mad Danelle Lothston began to bathe in blood and feast upon human flesh. Cannibalism drove her mad and thus her line met their downfall in 232 AC. Ser Waldemar Whent, a knight in service to House Lothston, was raised to a lord by Maekar the year before he died in the Peake Uprising.

House Whent had held Harrenhal for three generations. Waldemar and his wife had two sons: Oberon and Maddox. Oberon had two daughters: Lady Shella and Lady Minisa. Maddox had a daughter and two sons: Lady Sarya, Walter, and Ser Oswell Whent, a knight of the Kingsguard who died at the Tower of Joy in 281 AC. Walter married Lady Shella and became Lord of Harrenhal after her father died in the War of the Ninepenny Kings. Sarya became the fifth wife of Lord Walder Frey, and she had died childless. Minisa wed Lord Hoster Tully, and was the mother of Catelyn Tully, Lysa Tully, and Ser Edmure Tully.

Although it didn’t come as much of a surprise, Wynne hadn’t expected Lady Shella to name her instead of Edmure or any of the younger Stark children. Ser Danwell hadn’t set Lady Wynafrei aside even after so many stillbirths and miscarriages because he hoped he would become Lord of Harrenhal after Lady Shella died—he was going to spontaneously combust with rage when he found out.

Wynne smiled viciously at the thought, but that withered away as she penned her condolences with utmost sincerity. Then she folded sachets of Lady Shella’s favorite chamomile lavender tea into her letter, wrapped it with sheer black gauze and tied a yellow ribbon around the edges of the gauzy fabric so the sachets wouldn’t fall out. Herbal tea wasn’t going to make the Lady of Harrenhal feel any less devastated by the loss of her only daughter, but it was all she could do. Only the gods could bring people back to life, and she was no god.

If she could, she would have brought her father back to her mother. Dragged his soul out of the afterlife and poured raw magic over his bones until his body was hale and whole again. If she could do the only thing she knew would make her mother smile at her without any bitterness in the curve of her mouth or lurking behind her eyes, she would have.

Tears swelled and stung hot at the corners of her eyes. Apparently being pregnant made her weepy, because she never felt the need to cry so much before. Wynne sniffled and swiped at her eyes, the back of her hand nudging her eyeglasses askew.

“Bad news?” asked a quiet deep voice.

Wynne swallowed hard as Roose approached her softly until he stood at her back. “Lady Wynafrei Frey is dead,” she informed him before she rose to her feet and looked up into his pale grey eyes, “Lady Shella has named me heir to Harrenhal.”

Roose frowned, his brow furrowing. “Harrenhal is a perilous prize,” he murmured, “and not because of the curse of Harren the Black. We can ill afford to spread our resources so thin.”

Wynne bit her lip, gnawing as she nodded sharply. _I can revitalize the wood and repair the stone in the crumbling towers with magic_, she thought, _but that doesn’t solve the problem of how to garrison and staff the castle. Each of the five towers is the size of a great keep. Tearing down the Tower of Dread, the Tower of Ghosts, and either the Widow’s Tower or the Wailing Tower would be a good start_. “Let’s not worry about that now,” she suggested.

Roose arched his eyebrows at her as if to say, _We both know that you’re incapable of not worrying_.

Wynne valiantly resisted the urge to roll her eyes at him. “There’s no point in thinking about it while Lady Shella is still alive,” she clarified, “she might live another thirty years. I won’t inherit Harrenhal until she dies, and I have more than enough to worry about until then.”

Roose splayed one strong hand possessively over her belly. “We both do,” he whispered before he tilted her chin up with his other hand and bent to kiss her lips. Wynne curled the fingers of one hand around his forearm and dug the fingertips of the other into his shoulder, the black leather of his jerkin smooth underneath her hands. It was an uncharacteristically short and sweet kiss, augmented by his callused thumbs idly caressing her jaw and stroking the skin of her belly through her shift. “Why aren’t you dressed for dinner?” he asked her after he broke the kiss and skimmed the hand on her chin down over her shoulder to fondle the flare of her waist. Roose grinned when a gasp snagged in her throat, fleeting and soft. If she had ever worried that being pregnant would be the death of his desire for her, now she knew better. Roose hadn’t touched her aunt once they conceived because Aunt Bethany hadn’t wanted him to, and he respected her wishes. It was Aunt Bethany who taught him that he didn’t enjoy fucking women against their will. “Not that I mind, of course.”

Wynne glanced at the piles of letters on her desk, stacked beside the notebook she used to keep track of her finances. “I must have lost track of time,” she mumbled.

Roose knew her perception of the passage of time was malleable at best and disjointed at worst. One of the many repercussions of experiencing all of history in a day, at such a formative age. Sometimes an hour felt slow as molasses. Or entire weeks passed by in an eyeblink, with everything she experienced condensed. Distilled time. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been able to process so much information.

Unfortunately, that meant she often missed something because she didn’t always know precisely what to look for; but since the information was burned into her mind, she could always go back and look again.

* * *

After he and Robb had been escorted to their chambers in the guest tower where they changed and freshened up for dinner, Jon found himself in the great hall seated at the high table beside his brother. Sansa was seated between Robb and Domeric, who himself sat to his father’s left. Wynne sat to her husband’s right, with the Lady Ellara next to her. On the walls behind them, the grey stone was draped with banners: the snarling grey direwolf of Stark on white, the flayed man of House Bolton in pink and bloodred, the crowned and crossed battle axes of House Dustin on green and on gold, the black horsehead of House Ryswell on bronze engrailed in black, and the ply flame and black of House Crowl. Lord Bolton’s mother had been a Skagg, though he didn’t look it. Skagosi were so hairy that Maester Balder had believed they had Ibbenese blood, while others believed they descended from giants. Lord Bolton wasn’t a hairy man.

It was plain that beneath his black leather jerkin and bloodred silk tunic he was built lean and mean, all sinew and strength. Roose Bolton had a smile like a blade in the dark. There was only warmth in his pale eyes when he looked at Domeric, or when he set those eyes on his young wife. Wynne had worn a gown of bronze silk embroidered with delicate leaves sewn in bright golden thread, adorned with black ribbons and trimmed in black lace. In between the ribbons interlaced through eyelets of her sleeves at her elbows and below her shoulders, a golden kirtle peeked out. Domeric wore a grey satin tunic edged in black and fastened with ornate silver clasps, the braids that began at his temples and ended behind his head tied back with snow white ribbons. Stark colors in honor of Sansa, who herself had worn Bolton pink.

Robb was heir to Winterfell, and someday he would inherit the keep and command armies as the Warden of the North. Bran and Rickon would be his bannermen and rule holdfasts in his name. When their sisters were old enough, they would marry the heirs of great houses and become the mistresses of keeps of their own.

Jon had thought long and hard on what his future might hold while he lay abed at night with his brothers slumbering around him, and he had believed a bastard could not hope to earn a place amongst them. When he confided in her, Aly’s hackles went up and she had snapped at him. _You have options that I could never dream of. You could have squired to Ser Rodrik years ago, and be well on your way to earning your spurs. You could go south to the Citadel and forge a maester’s chain. You could become an apprentice and learn a trade. You could join the Night’s Watch and range with Uncle Benjen. At least you could be a knight, or become a scholar, or any number of worthwhile things. What place do you think a bastard **girl** could hope to earn? _It had made him feel ashamed, then angry, before the force had gone out of his anger because he knew his sister had been right.

When he learned that his twin had kept three dragons a secret from everyone, from _him_, he hadn’t known how to feel. Jon still didn’t, but he had begrudgingly accepted that Aly hadn’t kept her secret from him because she didn’t trust him. Frostfyre, Steelsong, and Proudwing thought of her as their mother, and she had protected them as any mother would have. Aly had always been a lone wolf, making herself scarce whenever she thought she wouldn’t be missed to sit in the library tower with her nose in a book. Jon missed her every time he looked over his shoulder and she was nowhere in sight. Now he knew that Aly hadn’t been distancing herself from him or their siblings intentionally—she became a mother to three dragons and they had gobbled up most of the time she would have spent with them.

_I wish Aly were here with us_, he thought.

Robb nudged his shoulder with his own and smiled at him, wide and warm. Jon settled back in his seat beside his brother and smiled in answer. On his other side was Lady Kenna, who flirted outrageously with him and the knights who approached her during the feast. Jon knew her flirtation didn’t mean anything, but he tried his best to flirt back.

If the king legitimized him and his twin, he would be expected to make a match with a lady. With the taint of his bastardy removed by royal decree, his future wife might even be highborn. It was ironic, since he knew he was of higher birth than anyone here. This knowledge made him bolder. Or bold enough to flirt less awkwardly than he might have otherwise, bold enough to make a pretty girl laugh with him instead of laughing at him.

Jon sipped the white sparkling wine served with dessert. It fizzed in his mouth, sweet and light. Almost dizzyingly so. In his nose the air was heavy with the smells of smoke and mead and roasted meat, lemons and peaches. Not even in his wildest dreams would he ever have expected to have such fun in a great hall lit by torches held in skeletal hands.

* * *

In her first moonturn at the Dreadfort, Sansa learned a great many new things. Among them how not to flirt, how to skinchange into an unkindness of ravens, how to embroider a perfect featherstitch, how to bottle feed a hungry dragonling hot sheep’s milk, how to coax the head baker into making her lemon poppyseed cakes with buttercream frosting, how to brew a delicious blend of honey lemon ginger tea and how shoot a crossbow.

When she arrived at the fortress, the first thing she did was visit the crypts beneath the castle keep and pay her respects to Lady Bethany and to her sons who died still in the cradle. Domeric had said the sons of Lord Redfort were his brothers and he hadn’t wanted to leave them, but they weren’t his only brothers. It broke her heart to think of him growing up with ghosts where he should have had siblings. Although she didn’t get along with all of them, especially Arya, Sansa couldn’t imagine not having her sisters and brothers. Or having them and then watching them die.

Since the Dreadfort had no sept where she could light candles for them and sing the “Song of the Seven,” Sansa had sung the song in the dark below the surface of the earth instead. It was a lullaby her mother sang to her and her siblings, a nostalgic hymn. Domeric knew the song because he had spent three years in the Vale of Arryn, and House Redfort kept faith with the Seven. Although he kept faith with her father’s gods as most northmen did, he had read the _Seven-Pointed Star_ and other holy texts. Sansa wondered if the Boltons would permit her to celebrate on holy days even without a sept to worship in, and Domeric had assured her they would. It wasn’t as though she were the only person in the fortress who kept faith with the old gods and the new. Lord Bolton’s own steward was a Valeman, his master-at-arms was a Manderly of White Harbor, and both of his elder sisters had married high lords who lived in the Vale.

Domeric, she learned, preferred salmon to any sort of white fish and he ate lamb but could not abide mutton. His favorite book was _Questions _by Maester Denestan. Domeric sang and played the high harp so beautifully it made her weep, and he played the fretted dulcimer in a manner that accentuated his strong hands and long skillful fingers. Sansa had never paid so much attention to a pair of hands before.

Sansa had also learned that horses could have twins, but it was very dangerous for the mare and her offspring. Wynne had put her hands inside the mare up to her elbows to help deliver the foals safely. Sansa had almost fainted at the sight. Domeric was so proud of her for not being too faint of heart to witness the birth of the colts that would belong to his brothers after they were born. Sansa hadn’t known that foals could stand up and walk around when they were less than an hour old, either.

Lord Rodrik Ryswell would gift his great-grandsons with destriers when they were old enough, but these foals would be coursers. Domeric had explained the different kinds of horses to her after the colts were foaled. There were three main types of horses used in warfare, known as chargers: destriers, prized stallions bred for war and most suited to jousting, with powerful hindquarters and well-arched necks; coursers, strong and swift horses bred for battle and running, often used for hunting; and rounceys, all-purpose mounts that could be ridden into battle or used as packhorses. Whereas palfreys were lightweight and bred for a smoother gait, most suited for riding long distances. House Ryswell bred mares, packhorses, and draft horses as well. All of his quarrelsome uncles had their own herds. Lady Bethany and Lady Barbrey had been dowered with horses as well as coin.

Wynne had introduced Sansa to every officer in the castle on the morning after she arrived. There were two-and-forty of them, twenty women and two-and-twenty men, each addressed in accordance with their station within the household. Wynne confided that she had appointed Ellara Stout as her seneschal, Kenna Holt as her Mistress of the Wardrobe, and Thea Waterman as her Mistress of Keys because it had occurred to her that she needed to learn how to delegate. It took Sansa a sennight to remember all two-and-forty of them by face and name.

Ser Wayland Manderly, the dashing master-at-arms, was courting the gentle Lady Ellara. Ellara was twelve years older than Sansa, and she was steadfastly loyal to Wynne. As the only daughter of Harwood Stout, Lord of Goldgrass, she and her brother Ronnel had grown up at Lady Dustin’s court in Barrowton. Whereas the other ladies had grown up at Lord Bolton’s court, because their fathers were his vassals.

Lady Kenna was eight years older than Sansa, an ebullient maiden who flirted with Jon, Robb and even with Jory, but she had no intention of marrying before she turned five-and-twenty. If she married at all. Kenna had two brothers, and she was from a lesser noble family. Which gave her freedom to choose that highborn girls did not have, because her dowry was modest and thus her marriage prospects were meager. Kenna had confided in Sansa that her parents sent her to their liege’s court in the hopes that she would snag Domeric, but she had foiled their matchmaking plans.

Taciturn Lady Thea was six years older than Sansa. As her mother’s sole heiress she was obligated to make a good match, but for whatever reason she was uninterested in courting and flirting. Sansa had surmised that her response to her parents’ expectations was to ignore them until they forced the issue.

Sansa oft found herself in the great hall in a midafternoon embroidery circle being held while the Lord and Lady of the Dreadfort presided over the halimote. Domeric sat at the high table on the dais with his father, Wynne, Maester Uthor, Ser Erskine, the castellan, who as the governor of the castellany that consisted of the castle town and surrounding lands held sway as chief administrator and constable, and Lord Bertram, who as the castle steward upheld the laws of the realm in court and often assembled a jury of suitors to pass judgment. Ellara, who as seneschal to Lady Bolton held sway over court proceedings, had joined the embroidery circle in one corner of the hall after the court session ended and petitions began. Sansa watched as she gracefully swept her skirts underneath her and sat, the silks whispering softly. Ellara was of a mellow disposition with a guileless, affably benevolent sort of charm. There was something most congenial about her. “Why did you accompany Wynne to the Dreadfort as part of her household rather than remain in the Barrowlands?” Sansa idly wondered aloud.

“When I was a girl of six,” Ellara said as she tugged the bodice of a gown she was in the process of embroidering over her knees and into her lap, “my lord father brought my brother and me to Barrow Hall. We attended the wedding of Lord Willam and Lady Barbrey, and met her natural children. Then came the rebellion, and Lady Barbrey was left to rule Barrowton while her lord husband fought and died. Although my lord father returned from war, his sword arm did not. Lady Agnes, the dowager of Barrowton, left for Raventree the year after her granddaughter was born. I was a girl of eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, and my days were spent watching over Cregard, Mel, and Wynne. Truth be told, it was much like herding cats. Cregard went to foster with Ser Roger Ryswell at Woodsedge the year Domeric came to serve as Lady Dustin’s page, and Mel was fostered at Mormont Keep a year after that. Ser Addam started training Wynne at arms as soon as she could walk and Domeric took her riding in the afternoons, but when she wasn’t ahorse or wielding her axe she preferred to read or sew in her room. Unlike her half-sister, whom I always found up a tree or crawling through a hollow log or hiding in a barrow. Wynne always was a quiet, ingenuous child. Then she began to speak to the dead.”

Sansa blinked, her perplexment startling. “What?”

“I would overhear her speaking to her lord father,” said Ellara, her voice as mild as skimmed milk. “Or her grandfather Lord Royce, who died in an epidemic of winter fever the year before I was born. Or Brandon Stark, a ward of House Dustin in his youth. Or even Gwynn the Green, the mythic axemaiden who founded House Dustin. I began to realize that while she could talk to the dead, they didn’t talk to her. Which did nothing to dissuade her from attempting to have conversations with people only she could see. Or hear. Lady Barbrey feared her heir was going mad, but Lady Agnes returned and whisked her away to Raventree before vicious rumors could spread. I was bereft with she and her natural siblings all scattered to the winds, but I had a place at Lady Dustin’s court and I wrote to Cregard and Mel and Wynne as often as I could. When she returned to Barrow Hall, she became more reticent than before and she had nightmares from which she woke screaming or sobbing night after night. It broke my heart that I could not soothe her, nor offer her respite from being so haunted.”

“One morning I asked her to hunt for pearls with me. I had a picnic lunch packed and I took her to where the Yarrow Water flowed into the Burn of Barrow, for that is the best place to hunt for pearl mussels. Alas, I have never been a strong swimmer, and summer rains had made the river water swell. I got caught in the current and I would have drowned had she not skinchanged into every stone loach, salmon, trout and stickleback in the river and swum me safely to shore.”

“Wynne exposed her true nature to save my life,” Ellara said as she began filling in the leaf she embroidered with a masterful satin stitch, “she loved me enough to protect me instead of herself and entrust me with the keeping of her secret. I am one of perhaps a dozen people who have the privilege of being so truly, deeply loved by her. Wynne has no choice but to watch over everyone. I accompanied her as part of her household because I am the one who watches over her.”

Domeric, of course, was another of those people. Sansa had worried her betrothed might have unrequited _feelings_ toward his cousin and stepmother, but they had burst out laughing at the absurdity of that notion when Jeyne broached the subject in the library one day and they had assured her through peals of laughter that neither of them had ever felt any such thing. Domeric loved his cousin like a sister, and those feelings had never wavered.

At dawn, Domeric woke to practice his bladework in the inner courtyard every morning. Sansa had grown up with the sound of steel in the yard, and scarcely a day of her life had passed without her waking at the clash of sword on sword. Robb and Jon had sparred with Domeric every morning while they stayed at the Dreadfort, tilted with him at the quintain, and even rode with him in the afternoons. Sansa had reluctantly joined them one day, and they had ridden along the Weeping Water to the shores of the Shivering Sea where they watched the sunset. It would have been more romantic if her brothers and Kenna weren’t around, but they both kept a respectful distance whilst she walked along the beach with her betrothed.

Domeric held her hand in the bend of his elbow as the horizon turned radiant shades of pink and orange and gold. As the light of the waning sun caught in his black hair, he told her about the last Red King who lined the shores of the Shivering Sea with flayed men after the armies of the Andals invaded his kingdom. Rogar the Huntsman bent the knee to House Stark, and their combined forces had driven the Andals out of the North by defeating the warlord Argos Sevenstar at the Battle of the Weeping Water. In those days, House Bolton had ruled the lands from the banks of the Last River to the estuary of the White Knife to the Sheepshead Hills. After the Kings of Winter conquered the North, the dominion of House Bolton diminished. Their vast territory was divided over the centuries between southron exiles and cadet branches of northern houses. House Manderly, House Woolfield, House Overton, House Hornwood, and House Flint of Widow’s Watch now ruled the lands that had once belonged to the Boltons.

“Most people only remember the enmity between our houses,” Domeric said, “because my forebears sacked and burned Winterfell and rebelled against the Kings in the North thousands of years ago, but when our houses were joined, they became a force to be reckoned with.”

Sansa peered up at him through her lashes as Kenna had instructed when she asked the older girl how to flirt. “I hope we carry on that family tradition,” she told him.


	18. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 1**  
Epilogue
> 
> Actions have consequences.

**We grow. It hurts at first.**

Sylvia Plath, “Witch Burning”

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅤⅠⅠⅠ ❧**

297 AC

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

“Do you know the story of the Dark Lady?” Wynne mumbled as she cuddled up against his side. It was a few minutes to midnight, the hour tipping over the dark threshold of another day.

Roose was idly stroking the curve of her shoulder with his fingertips while she caressed the sparse hair on his chest, basking in the warmth of her soft flesh seeping into him skin to skin and breathing in the intoxicating scent of her. “No,” he whispered back.

“In the beginning,” Wynne said in her hushed raconteur voice, “the followers of the Lord of Light believe there were two gods. R’hllor, the Heart of Fire, the red god of flame and shadow, of life and light, and M’orena, the Bringer of Change, the white goddess of cold and darkness, of death and decay. Those who follow R’hllor do not speak her name. Instead they refer to her as the Great Other. R’hllor and M’orena created the world from which sprung other numerous and nameless gods and goddesses, the old gods we believe in who speak through stone and rivers and trees and the deities worshipped on the continents beyond Westeros. Thousands of years ago, M’orena fell in love on the night of Samhuinn and chose to remain in this world to live as the wife of a human man because as the goddess of death she could not bear children. In choosing life, she relinquished her godhood and with it her memories of being a goddess. Unfortunately, a race of creatures she created were ice made flesh and they could not forgive the human who stole the heart of the only mother they had ever known.”

“M’orena created the Others,” he deduced. There were those who might say that ice flowed through his veins, but he was made of flesh and bone and warm blood like any other man. What he saw in the flames of the glass candle was something else, something cold and unequivocally inhuman.

Wynne hummed in agreement, a dulcet _mm-hmm_ that he felt as much as heard with her head nestled up against his shoulder. “M’orena was almost human without her godhood, and she was powerless when the Others came for her. After they slew her husband and the children she bore him, they imprisoned her in the Land of Always Winter before they returned her godhood to her even though she did not want it. In the story it’s said all snow that falls is her tears, all cold wind her wails of agony. M’orena was locked in a tower of glass and obsidian made to contain her power, but they did not expect her to reach out in her dreams. Thousands of green dreamers attempted to rescue her only to end up impaled on spires of ice. When the goddess of the earth saw what had become of those greenseers, she beseeched the Children of the Forest to help the one chosen to fight the Others and save humankind from extinction.”

“Azor Ahai,” Roose said, because every northerner knew that part of the story, “the Warrior of Light, the Son of Fire, the last hero. It took him half a year to forge Lightbringer, the Red Sword of Heroes, the flaming sword whose light he lit with the soul of the woman he loved. Then he fought and won the Battle for the Dawn and formed the Night’s Watch.”

Wynne hummed again. “Azor Ahai found M’orena in her tower, but only after she had cut her own heart out of her chest with a shard of glass in order to remove her godhood. When the gods die, they are reborn as the seeds from which a heart tree grows and their spirits dwell within a weirwood forevermore. Alas, the Children of the Forest didn’t plant the heart of M’orena in the earth. Instead, they preserved it until the First Men broke the Pact of the Isle of Faces and they created the Night King to destroy their enemies. Most of the Others we must defeat were sacrifices offered to the Night King by some tribes of wildlings, changed as infants too young to remember they were ever human. In essence, the inhuman foes waging a war against us are monsters our forebears made.”

“Now we reap what they sowed,” whispered Roose.

Wynne yawned and made a quiet soporific noise in the back of her throat as she cuddled even closer to him, her legs tangled with his as her soft breasts pressed against his side. “Now we plant new seeds,” she said, “and we see what grows.”

* * *

_In the dirt, uprooted_

* * *

At twilight on the eve of the Samhuinn masquerade, the ballroom in the Dreadfort was alive with light and shadow. Clusters of crystal chandeliers cut with prismatic glass dangled from the ceiling, whilst ornate silver candelabras adorned with slender black tapers stood like sentinels atop the banquet tables festooned with small dishes and casks of wine. It was perhaps the weakest point in the castle keep, the only room with exorbitantly tall sunburst windows from which hung red velvet curtains. Since the ballroom was located in the upper ward of the keep behind three stone walls insulated by the lower ward and two courtyards, those extravagant windows didn’t make for an easy target. No siege engine could hurl a projectile high or far enough to break them, and even if one were invented, the army with such a siege engine would have to breach three stone walls before they could besiege the castle keep.

Wynne married the Lord of the Dreadfort for many reasons, and dwelling in the heart of the most impenetrable fortress in the North was incontrovertibly one of them. It made her feel safer than she ever had before.

Alas, she was not safe.

This was made abundantly clear during the masquerade after she withdrew into a withdrawing room connected to the ballroom, took a sip of lemonsweet that seemed too sweet on her tongue, and woke up outside the castle walls.

When she awoke, confusion swamped her because she did not remember falling asleep. It was plain that someone had dosed her with sweetsleep, even as sluggish as her thoughts were. Two doses, because one would have only made her groggy and three would’ve been fatal. Dimly she noticed that her ankles were locked in wooden fetters coated in something with a strong unpleasant odor she recognized, her wrists tied behind her back; she was not hooded or gagged, so whoever had abducted her did not care if she could see their face or whether anyone heard her scream. Wynne swallowed hard as she flexed her wrists in the confines of the rope, and remembered that she hadn’t worn her wrist sheathes because her gown was sleeveless; she hadn’t sewn any hidden pockets into the skirts of her ballgown either, nor had she worn her doloire to the masquerade, so the comforting weight of its holster wasn’t strapped to her thigh.

Straw was matted underneath her, poking at her through her skirts. Wynne glanced around the crude pigpen as best she could in the dark cut with slices of moonlight and noticed a distinct lack of pigs inside. Dread unfurled in her stomach, agonizing spikes of panic threatening to overwhelm her.

_It’s solanine_, she thought as she inhaled the malodorous scent that clung to the wood and felt the numb hollow deep in her marrow where her magic should have thrummed, _poison extracted from the unripe berries of the same plant Ramsay was going to use to kill Domeric. Whoever made these fetters must’ve known that solanine nullifies magic. It’s what Grand Maester Alford used to poison the last dragon. I have no power here_.

“You’re awake.”

Wynne bit down on the inside of her cheek to smother a snort as she looked up and saw the kennelmaster’s granddaughter. Myranda Bones, a pale slender girl with long auburn hair whose pretty face was twisted in a cruel smirk.

Ramsay and Reek had kept peasant girls here, and they used rope to tie them up because rope was versatile enough that it could be obtained without suspicion. These fetters were designed with one purpose in mind: to bind someone with magic and subsequently prevent them from using their power to escape.

Wynne slipped her demantoid garnet ring off, popped the sharp thin blades out from underneath the gemstone, and twisted her fingers so hard it made her joints ache before she began to covertly saw at the rope around her wrists. “I was wondering when you would take revenge for Ramsay,” she rasped and winced at her dry her throat was. Not _if_, but _when_. It was inevitable. “Were you attempting to lull me into a false sense of security by waiting almost half a year?”

“Ramsay promised to marry me after he became the heir to the Dreadfort.” Myranda approached her with a contemptuous sneer on her face and crouched in front of her to snarl, “You ruined everything.”

Wynne didn’t bother to smother the snort that ensued at that. “Ramsay lied,” she retorted. “If his plan to poison Domeric had succeeded and Roose had petitioned the king to legitimize his bastard rather than remarrying in order to produce a legitimate heir whose mother wasn’t common, he would’ve been expected to marry a highborn lady after he was granted the right to carry on the Bolton line. Roose wouldn’t have permitted any heir of his to marry a kennelgirl.”

Myranda sat back on her haunches and backhanded her viciously across the face, as Ramsay had done almost half a year ago. It was a harsh blow with enough force to make black spots bloom in the abyss behind her eyelids, though she remained upright with her back to the wall of the pigpen where the other end of the chain attached to her fetters was embedded. Wynne gritted her teeth in pain and hooked her thumb into the ring she dropped before she began to saw at the rope again. “Lord Bolton wouldn’t have been able to keep us apart,” the kennelgirl hissed as tears fell and streaked down her face. “Ramsay would have killed him.”

Wynne shrugged and winced again with a hiss exhaled slowly through clenched teeth, the flesh of her cheek stinging as her nostrils flared. Ramsay had been a monster, but that didn’t mean she killed him for any moral reason. Wynne had merely perceived a threat and responded accordingly, with ruthless efficiency. If she hadn’t accompanied Domeric to the mill and he had died instead of Ramsay, she would have sought revenge. Wynne couldn’t even blame Myranda, because the kennelgirl had only done what she herself would have—except she wouldn’t have given her victim any opportunity to escape her wrath. _Bloodraven once told me that an eye for an eye only makes the world blind_, she thought. _Maybe he was right_. “So you’re going to kill me,” she deduced.

Myranda shook her head. “Not quite yet.” At that, she opened a glass jar of cold liquid and held it close enough for Wynne to breathe in the smell that wafted from it.

Wynne shrank back on sheer instinct as the scent invaded her nostrils: a blend of tansy, wormwood, mint and pennyroyal. No spoonful of honey to temper the bitterness of the moon tea. Shock forced all of the air out of her lungs in a soft agonized gasp, followed by the eerie silence that stemmed from her forgetting how to breathe.

“First you’re going to drink this,” Myranda said in her sweetest voice and smiled venomously. “I’m going to watch you bleed your heirs out in the dirt, and then I’m going to kill you. What a pity Ramsay can’t be here to watch you suffer.”

Wynne forced herself to remain calm on the surface and show no fear as she began to breathe again, even as incandescent rage seethed in her veins and bile pooled in the back of her throat. In that moment, any empathy she might’ve felt withered away.

_Someone help me_, she thought desperately, _save my children. Please_.

There was no help forthcoming as far as Wynne knew, however. “I will not,” she whispered, her voice wooden.

“You will.” Myranda held a dagger to her throat, the sharp edge of the blade kissing her skin as the rim of the jar came perilously close to her lips. “A little bird told me how to get my revenge. You can’t do anything without magic. You’re powerless. You have nothing.” Myranda loomed over her and leaned in close to whisper in her ear, “You _are _nothing. Someone takes all that power away, then what’s left?”

Wynne seized the opportunity that had presented itself like a raven descending on carrion. Anxiety surged through her as she opened her mouth as wide as she could and sank her teeth into warm pale flesh. Wynne severed her external jugular vein and ripped her throat out with all of her strength, tearing through tendons and muscles. Hot arterial blood filled her mouth and sprayed all over her face as tea spilled down the front of her gown and Myranda attempted to shove her away, hands scrambling as she clamped her teeth down and took a bite out of her neck. Wynne spat a gobbet of flesh into the dirt and ran her tongue over her teeth.

_Someone takes all that power away, then what’s left?_

Wynne squinted and watched the peasant girl bleed out through all of the little red flecks of cruor that had stained her eyeglasses. “Me,” she whispered as blood dripped from her chin.

It took her an inconvenient amount of time to saw through the rope around her wrists and unlock the fetters around her ankles without magic, but she was persistent. Night had fallen when she emerged from the pigpen. Wynne doubted very much time had passed since Myranda smuggled her unconscious body out of the Dreadfort, though how she had done so was unclear. There were three corpses on the ground outside, the bodies of two porters and a guardsman that she recognized lit by the moon that hung in the black sky like a singular all-seeing eye. One of them lay on the ground in a pool of dark blood, his throat slashed. Another had been killed by a slender arrow that had severed the brachial artery in his upper arm. One of them had gotten further away before an arrow pierced his back and perforated his lung. Ramsay had taught Myranda how to bowhunt, and he had taught her well.

Wynne squinted as she took in her surroundings and saw the mill, the cornfields, the cottage where Ramsay had lived with his mother. In the path of dirt in front of the cottage was a wayn packed with casks of food and beer, one of the many Domeric sent to villages surrounding the fortress during every festival. Which explained how they had gotten her out of the castle: they locked her feet in fetters to nullify her magic and put her unconscious body in a cask, the porters had loaded her into the wayn, and they had left the Dreadfort with no one the wiser.

Myranda had killed them all once the men had served their purpose, because dead men would tell no tales.

Wynne stepped into the shallows of the river and knelt, scooping moonlit rivulets of water into her hands and scrubbing the blood from her skin and hair; her gown and kirtle were a lost cause because they had been white before she tore a woman’s throat out. Then she gagged and gracelessly dropped onto all fours as more bile rose up from the back of her throat; she clawed her fingers into the petrous riverbed, the rush of the river muffling her whimpers and wheezes as her stomach roiled. Wynne vomited every appetizer she enjoyed at the masquerade into the water, her arms trembling beneath her as she retched; every muscle in her back and legs ached, her wrists and ankles were sore from the rope and fetters, and she had almost _died_. Hot tears pricked at the corners of her eyes with only the moon to witness her falling apart. Wynne sat in the river and shook with sobs that shuddered through her until she felt the soft psithurism of her magic thrumming under her skin. Then she cleaned her eyeglasses with tremulous hands, gargled water and spat it out to mitigate the acidic taste of regurgitation that clung to her teeth, and contumaciously put herself back together.

There was no one inside the cottage, dead or alive. It was Samhuinn, so the unwed miller to whom Roose had given the mill after she axed the former miller’s widow and Ramsay was ostensibly at the masquerade. There were two draft horses in the small nearby pasture that was obviously made for goats, not horses of any kind. Whoever had locked them in hadn’t bothered to remove their harnesses or halters, but at least they hadn’t been wearing blankets or bridles attached to metal bits in their mouths. Both heavy geldings were agitated by the scent of blood and stressed from being confined to such a cramped space, their ears swiveling back and forth. One snaked his neck from side to side and pawed at the ground while the other stomped his forefeet, pinned his ears back and cocked his hind legs. Wynne made soothing noises as she approached them slowly. One of the geldings calmed at the sight of her while the other curled his lips back from his teeth in flehmen, breathing in and blowing air back out. When he inhaled her scent, he began to mellow; she rubbed the muscles in his neck and cooed at him until he mellowed further and let her stroke his chestnut mane out of his eyes. There was a white star on his forehead that matched the white on his muzzle, the white coronet on his left foreleg and white stocking on his right hind leg. Whereas the other draft horse was dapple grey, with a black mane and tail.

Wynne looped a length of rope she looted from one of the dead men through a metal ring on the halter of the chestnut and led him to the wayn; he permitted her to hitch his harness to the cart, whickering impatiently as she led the dapple over.

_A little bird told me how to get my revenge_, Myranda had said.

Varys had exploited her desire for vengeance to strike at Wynne, who didn’t see it coming because she hadn’t been looking for it. There were no spies in the Dreadfort that Wynne didn’t know about. Neither she nor Roose had removed them, because it was more useful to know who the spies were so they could feed them false information if they chose to do so. Which didn’t mean a little bird couldn’t have come north to make contact with Myranda outside the castle and feed her information that she used for her own ends. Although she expected the kennelgirl to take her revenge, she hadn’t in her wildest dreams thought it would escalate to the point that Myranda would pose a real threat to her. Wynne had made a mistake, the sort of stupid mistake she thought she was too smart to make…a mistake that could have gotten her and her unborn children killed.

_This is why I didn’t want anyone to ever know what I am_, she thought, _and why I didn’t want to play the game of thrones._ _I only survived because Myranda assumed I wouldn’t be able to fight back without magic or weapons, and because she wanted to make me suffer and despair before she killed me. I__t only takes one well-informed enemy to kill me, one unseen enemy to strike while I sleep or while my third eye is closed. I may not be so fortunate next time_.

Wynne clambered up onto the seat in front of the wayn and looped the reins of both draft horses loosely around her fist as she opened her third eye. Varys was in his chambers in the Red Keep, reading through reports compiled by his spies; his plump face was scrubbed clean of powder, and he wore a robe of silk polychrome damask in lavender and pale gold over velvet slippers. Wynne thought about skinchanging into the aglossal child beside him because she knew it would frighten him if she chose to speak to him from the mouth of a child with no tongue, but doing so might harm the child and she was not the sort of monster who traumatized children if she could help it. Instead she caught sight of a mouse in one of the walls and slipped into its skin, waited until he sent the child out of his solar, and scurried through a hole in the wall and up the wooden leg of his desk to stand before him on its rodent hindquarters with its paws folded in front of her.

“Lord Varys,” she greeted him with the utmost courtesy.

Varys the Spider, one of the most powerful men in all of Westeros, flinched at the sound of her voice coming from the mouth of a little mouse. “Lady Bolton, I presume,” he said. There was a small reticule around his neck which contained a glass jar filled with tufts of solanine crystallized into salt form, a crude protection charm against magic and sorcery. It would not protect him from her, because her physical form was a thousand leagues away.

“I never intended to make an enemy of you,” Wynne told him quite honestly, if only because she knew he would consider her an enemy regardless of her intentions. Then she jumped from his desk and severed his carotid with the sharp yellow incisors of the mouse in one bite.

Varys would never have a chance to lock her in a crate as the Spider had done to the Myrish sorcerer who castrated him, nor would he ever disempower her again. Once had been more than enough.

After she drove for half a mile, a barred owl swooped down to land on her shoulder as the wayn rolled over the packed earth beneath its wheels. In the moonlight, its white feathers glowed while its brown feathers seemed black. Wynne squawked indignantly as eight curved sharp talons dug into her skin and profusely apologized to the draft horses when she yanked on the reins.

Sansa peered at her through dark brown strigine eyes and nudged her sweetly with the barred owl’s yellow beak as hounds bayed and thunderous hoofbeats struck the road ahead of her. Iron and glass lanterns that swung in the hands of the riders gleamed and chased away the moonlit blackness, the flames inside eating through reservoirs of whale oil. Wynne tugged on the reins to bring the draft horses to a halt and squinted at the riders as they came upon her.

Domeric rode ahead by half a horse, his long black hair tangling in the dark air behind him as the lightweight rainbow armor he wore to the ball shone in the moonglow. Roose was still all in black; they had dressed as the Lion of Night and Maiden-Made-of-Light, a god and goddess in YiTish mythology whose son was known as God-on-Earth. Their descendants had ruled the Great Empire of the Dawn before the Blood Betrayal, which the YiTish and Lengii believed had ushered in the Long Night. Roose had removed his ebony leonine mask and black velvet cape, and on his face he wore the most fearful expression Wynne had seen her aloof husband make.

Locke grinned at her, a flash of teeth in the night. “Our lady yet lives,” he crowed, “and she has returned clad in the blood of her enemies!”

Wynne valiantly resisted the urge to roll her eyes at him as the hounds stood on their hindquarters and pawed at the wayn, a pack of hunters boofing proudly after tracking down their prey. “I’m fine,” she assured Roose as the sound of hoofbeats faded and he dismounted from his palfrey. “All this blood isn’t mine—”

Roose lifted her up out of the seat on the front of the wayn and crushed her against his chest with the force of his embrace. One callused palm cupped the back of her neck before his hands meticulously roved over her body, checking for even the slightest injury. Wynne hooked her arms around his neck and shook like a leaf as she felt the frenetic beat of his heart resonate from his chest through hers. In his arms, every drop of tension she accumulated in her body seeped out of her. Wynne swallowed thickly as she inhaled deeply through her nose and breathed in his sharp sweet scent. Terrifyingly potent calm swept over her and she slumped, trusting her husband to hold her upright. Roose held her with his strong arms encircling the curve of her waist, his fingertips digging into her flesh hard enough to bruise the bend of her back while she closed her eyes and breathed in again even deeper than before. It was a primal act, the animal part of her recognizing her mate and taking comfort in his smell and touch. This was more visceral than lust or even love. This was safe. This was _home_.

“Whose?”

Roose whispered the question to her in his softest, coldest voice. There was a sharpness to him, a tightening of every muscle in his lean body that spoke of the potential for violent retribution. Roose was like a knife being drawn, even as his hands cupped her face so gently and he glowered at the shadow of the contusion forming on her cheek and the red abrasions from the rope on the skin of her wrists illuminated by the lanterns. Only he was permitted to bind her, to leave a mark on her skin. Those cold eyes of his sliced her to the core.

Wynne bit her lip before she slowly shook her head. “Take me home,” she whispered back. “Please, my lord.”

Roose growled low in his throat to make his displeasure known before he acquiesced, because he knew her well enough by now to understand that she would stop withholding vital information once they were away from prying eyes and ears. Then he bent to kiss her forehead, reluctant to relinquish his hold on her. “Of course, my lady,” he murmured.

Domeric waited patiently with the owl perched on his shoulder until his father let her go and he swooped her into a hug so fierce he lifted her off the ground as the night hunter took flight; he was taller than his father by almost four inches, and that meant he towered over her by fourteen inches. Wynne sniffled and wrapped her arms tight around his shoulders, her feet dangling in slippers caked with grime and mud and other sludge. “Do not ever frighten me like that again,” he ordered and gave her another gentle squeeze before he put her down.

Wynne mustered a shred of a smile, but made no such false promise.

* * *

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

Samhuinn meant _summer’s end_ in the Old Tongue, a festival held on the last day of Blood Moon. One of four quarter days celebrated every year in between the solstices and equinoxes. Bealtainn, the festival held on the first day of Flower Moon, was another. Since the dawn of days, the First Men believed in the liminality of those nights. It was said the spirits of the dead walked among the living, the spirits of the gods deigned to mingle with mortals at evenfall, and that any children born on those nights would be more god than human. Wynne’s nameday coincided with Bealtainn, so Roose almost believed that particular legend was true. Lady Barbrey had always said the birth of her precious trueborn daughter was auspicious.

Nothing about tonight was auspicious, however.

It hadn’t taken him terribly long to notice that his lady was conspicuously absent, even in a ballroom full of masked courtiers and townsfolk. There was a balcony above the ballroom where he stood and searched for even the slightest glimpse of her. Roose saw no magnificent ocherous hair, no delicate gossamer silver mask, no iridescent white silk organza gown. Wynne had vanished. In that moment, a thrill had gone through Roose and he had hoped this was a new game. If she had run from him, he could hunt her down and punish her. It made his skin prickle with predatory anticipation, and he smiled to himself with all of his teeth.

Then he took Steelshanks Walton aside. Steelshanks was the captain of his household guard, a soldier of iron loyalty; he covertly sent guardsmen to search the entire castle from turrets to cellars, even the oubliettes. Or perhaps especially the oubliettes, since many of them had been empty for months or even years and they would make the ideal hiding place.

After it had become apparent that she wasn’t hiding anywhere within the walls of the Dreadfort, the prickles of anticipation became a fearful sensation. Wynne hadn’t been playing a new game, and that meant someone had taken her from him. Roose ordered Locke to fetch his best hounds from the kennels and prepare for a hunt. They caught her scent in the withdrawing room and followed it down a back staircase used by the servants to a postern in the inner courtyard, where the scent trail ended. Roose deduced that whoever abducted his wife must have masked her scent by loading her onto a wayn in a wooden cask, with no one in the courtyard the wiser.

Domeric had implored Sansa to skinchange into an owl in order to search for Wynne, since neither ravens nor falcons were night hunters. Sansa flew on the wings of the owl for half an hour before she caught sight of a wayn parked outside a mill on the banks of the Weeping Water and Wynne in the pigpen, rendered unconscious and in chains; she hadn’t seen the face of whoever took Wynne, but she had told him that it was a woman. Roose had set out with two dozen men with all haste and Wynne had met him on the road, her nacreous white gown stained red. Then he brought her back to the Dreadfort, where she belonged.

Wynne adjusted her eyeglasses with her fingertips as she soaked in his massive pink bathtub in the aftermath of scouring the dried remnants of arterial blood from her curls, the rims fogged up from the steam wafting around the room. Shorter curls that framed her face had begun to dry in spirals and slashes that fell over her forehead; the bruise on her face was in the process of darkening from red to almost black, and she had canted her chin downward with her eyes downcast as she hunched over. Roose had never seen her subdued or in shock. It was unsettling. “When I was chained up and fettered,” she told him softly, “I felt a chasm inside me where my magic should be. It was the worst feeling in the world.”

Roose knew how to break people, but he didn’t know how to put them back together without chinks in the armor of their minds where he could slip a twist of his flaying knife or a sharp word in again. Flesh was easy to cut, but difficult to heal. Roose had learned that firsthand, and he knew that some wounds bled forever underneath the skin once they had been inflicted. Wynne didn’t break easily; she just needed time to heal the fresh wounds that had been inflicted upon her. Roose clenched his jaw and growled low in his throat, the sound rendered harsh and heavy with frustration. _I must stay calm_, he thought. _No man can think so full of anger_. “I’ll flay Ben Bones for this,” he said, “as retribution for what his granddaughter did to you.”

Wynne sighed. “Please don’t flay him,” she mumbled. “Ben Bones has been the kennelmaster at the Dreadfort longer than you’ve been alive, and he has never been anything but loyal to House Bolton. I won’t have you repay that loyalty with violence. No matter how much you want to hurt someone for what happened to me or how powerless it made you feel.”

Roose gritted his teeth and exhaled a fraught gust of air. Sometimes her perceptiveness annoyed him, especially when she ruthlessly demonstrated that she could see through him.

Varys was dead; Wynne had killed him from a thousand leagues away. It was fortunate that no one could hope to prove his wife had done so. Those at court old enough to remember when Bloodraven ruled the realm with spies and sorcery might suspect her, but he was more honorable than Wynne…until he wasn’t. When he killed, he used weirwood arrows fletched with raven feathers or the Valyrian steel longsword Dark Sister. Not little mice. Varys also had no shortage of enemies, many of whom had wanted him dead. If Renly Baratheon investigated his murder, his justiciars and bailiffs would have a great many leads to follow…none of which led to Wynne.

“I spoke with Mayseline about ensuring that records of Varys purchasing slave children with coin from the crown will be covertly sent to Lord Renly so his death will be posthumously justified in the eyes of the law and I asked the mice and rats to gorge themselves on his remains,” Wynne informed him, “rats devour the eyes and burrow into the skull. Varys doesn’t have a household or even a full staff of servants because he doesn’t want anyone to spy on him or monitor his comings and goings. When his body is found, Pycelle won’t be able to deduce what killed him. There won’t be enough of him left.”

“What if they notice the animals are acting strangely?” he asked.

“It’s not strange for rodents to eat dead bodies,” Wynne retorted, “the Silent Sisters in the Great Sept of Baelor are tasked with keeping mice and rats away from the corpses during funeral rites because rats urinate and defecate on the bodies while they eat. Which makes death and decay smell worse. All of the fragrant herbs and salts in the world can’t mask the reek of rat piss. If someone does manage to deduce that a mouse bite killed him, odds are they’ll assume the mouse went rabid before they believe in magic.”

Roose laughed softly at how uncouth his little wife could be when she felt comfortable—or uncomfortable—enough to shed her prim façade. It was much easier to laugh than acknowledge that he had come perilously close to being widowed again, that he had almost lost her forever. While she lit the glass candle in her chambers to speak with Mayseline in her solar, he had been leeched in a futile attempt to bleed the worry and subsequent cold black rage out of him. It was unsuccessful. Roose had never before experienced such staggering relief, nor such potent anger.

When he was young, his father had begun training him to survive. It would make him stronger, his father had promised him. When people tried to hurt him, he would have the strength to withstand them. It began with being held underwater beneath a grate in one of the oubliettes designed for water torture until he couldn’t breathe, the cold seeping into him until he felt as though he were encased in a protective layer of ice. Unbreakable, so everything his father did after that wouldn’t make him feel anything. There was a twisted kind of care in the way his father had hurt him, how deliberately he avoided doing any permanent damage to his organs or his bones. Nothing he endured had left him with scars, because his father knew how to break a person without breaking the skin.

Roose had been trained to see other people as hunks of meat, flesh and blood for his own personal use. It was no wonder he couldn’t keep himself warm after that. Roose hadn’t even known warmth could be necessary for survival, until he married Wynne. If the people who presumed to harm his wife had been at _his_ mercy, he would have shown none. “Whom do you think Robert will appoint to replace the Spider as his Master of Whisperers?” he asked.

Wynne shrugged and gnawed anxiously on the inside of her cheek before she answered him. “Lord Varys had such a monopoly on espionage in the Seven Kingdoms that his successor will be placed in a job much too large for them no matter who is appointed,” she told him matter-of-factly, “but Lord Baelish is the most likely candidate. Although he’s Master of Coin, it’s not unprecedented for a Master of Whisperers to hold another small council position.”

Roose nodded succinctly. “Larys Clubfoot was Master of Whisperers and Lord Confessor to Viserys the Droll and Aegon the Usurper,” he said, “and Bloodraven was Master of Whisperers and Hand of the King to Aerys the Scholar and Maekar the Anvil.”

Wynne mirrored his nod and made ripples in the bathwater with one fingertip that flowed in rings before they vanished or were overshadowed by new ripples, the rope burns on her wrists raw and red against her pale delicate skin. “I expect Lord Baelish to humbly volunteer his services,” she said, “but we’ll see.”

Roose folded his arms across his chest and grinned at her, smothering his fear and helplessness behind a veil of cold cunning until his skin tingled with shivers of anticipation scintillating enough to raise the fine hairs on his arms and at the back of his neck. _So the game is afoot_, he thought. “Yes,” he whispered conspiratorially, “we shall see.”

* * *

**❦**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Afterword**
> 
> In the pilot episode of _GoT_, the opening scene is the adaptation of _AGoT_, Prologue. In the book, this scene took place at night. In the show, it’s shot in broad daylight. Which totally misses the point of the Long Night: the Others can’t withstand direct sunlight. Otherwise they wouldn’t have _needed_ to block out the sun. David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have explicitly said the magic aspects of _ASoIaF_ didn’t appeal to them, and that’s obvious from the beginning of the show. I did some fairytale-esque worldbuilding to amalgamate the Others from the books with the Others from the show and make that work thematically, because I did like one change Benioff and Weiss made: they created the Night King, a brainwashed man turned into a monster by the Children of the Forest to punish the people who stole their lands and drove them to extinction. This has more depth than George R. R. Martin’s white walkers, who are the orcs of _ASoIaF_: inhuman creatures bent on destroying humanity because they’re evil so the heroes don’t have any moral compunction about slaughtering them all to save the world and save themselves.
> 
> Since the Children of the Forest can be interpreted as allegorical to indigenous peoples—something I am very uncomfortable with because they’re nonhuman and dehumanization and subsequent genocide of aboriginal peoples has been rampant throughout history—GRRM had a colossal missed opportunity to talk about the devastating effects of colonialism. GRRM writing the Children of the Forest and giants as inhuman aboriginal peoples is racist, regardless of his authorial intent. Benioff and Weiss bringing in the Night King as the embodiment of their rage at the people who colonized their continent and drove them almost to extinction had so much wasted potential. GRRM has said the Others are allegories for climate change, and that aligns perfectly with my reinterpretation: the Others don’t want to destroy humanity because they’re evil, they’re bent on destroying humanity because of atrocities perpetrated by humans with devastating repercussions that humans now have to fix before we become extinct.
> 
> If you think fantasy isn’t a political genre, then you haven’t been paying attention.


	19. Appendix A

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
Appendix A: The North, c. 297 AC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies to anyone who hoped this was me posting the first chapter of Book 2. I was going through my _Skin in the Game_ fic subfolder and my private Dreamwidth entries and found my notes for Book 1 scattered across several documents, so I thought I would post the more coherent notes as appendices for those of you who are just as much of a nerd as I am. YEET.
> 
> Despite being inspired by Scotland, the North is enormous by comparison. Scotland is 30,918 miles², whereas the North is 1,132,154 miles². Not including the Gift, which is 63,347 miles². According to the [Atlas of Ice and Fire](https://atlasoficeandfireblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/28/the-size-of-westeros-revisited/), Westeros is approximately 6,890,000 miles² while the Seven Kingdoms are 3,062,967 miles².
> 
> All hyperlinks are to [A Wiki of Ice and Fire](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Main_Page), for anyone who only watched the show and is curious about characters or houses from the books or anyone who read the main series but has not read _The World of Ice and Fire_. If you hover over the annotations, you should be able to read the hidden text. Unless your browser is not compatible with subscript and superscript or you’re on mobile, in which case the annotations can be read in the endnotes.

* * *

☙ **The North, c. 297 AC** ❧

* * *

There are nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, the largest of which is the North, spanning 1,132,154 miles². Although some claim the North is the size of the southron kingdoms combined, in reality the North is approximately a third of the size of the Seven Kingdoms and roughly a sixth the size of the continent of Westeros itself. Only three significantly large settlements exist in the North: the port city of White Harbor, the wooden city of Barrowton, and Winter Town, which surrounds the castle of Winterfell. Its total population is roughly four million people. 50,000 of those people live in White Harbor. 25,000 live in Barrowton, while another 225,000 live in the Barrowlands. 10,000 people live in the Winter Town in all seasons, but their numbers swell to 50,000 or more during the winter. Their main trade exports are lumber and timber, but other resources include plentiful game, mines that produce iron, silver, gold and lead, among other kinds of raw ore and gemstones, quarries, whale oil, mutton and wool.

Historically, the North was ruled by a number of great houses descended from kings of the First Men until House Stark, the Kings of Winter, conquered everything north of the Neck and became Kings in the North. When the Andals invaded Westeros on their holy crusade, only the North avoided being conquered and converted to the Faith of the Seven. Nevertheless, the realm became known as the Seven Kingdoms.

Torrhen Stark, the King Who Knelt, became the last of the Kings in the North when he bent the knee to Aegon the Conqueror in the year 1 BC. Aegon I was crowned in 1 AC, and he named Torrhen Stark the first Warden of the North in the aftermath. Thus, the hereditary titles of House Stark became Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, and they continued to rule the North for another three centuries.

* * *

**☙ Ruling House ❧**

* * *

HOUSE STARK OF WINTERFELL, sworn to House Baratheon of King’s Landing

**Lord Eddard Stark**, called Ned, b. 262 AC  
—Head of House Stark  
—Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North  
—Second son of Lord {[Rickard Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Rickard_Stark)} and Lady {[Lyarra Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Lyarra_Stark)}

**Lady Catelyn Stark**, née Tully, b. 263 AC  
—Lady of Winterfell  
—Wife of Lord Eddard  
—Eldest daughter of Hoster Tully, Lord of Riverrun and Lord Paramount of the Trident  
—Formerly betrothed to {Brandon Stark}

**Robb Stark**, a warg, b. 281 AC  
—Heir to Winterfell  
—Eldest son of Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn  
—Namesake of King Robert I Baratheon

**Lady Sansa Stark**, a skinchanger, b. 285 AC  
—Eldest daughter of Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn  
—Betrothed to Domeric Bolton and fostered at the Dreadfort  
—Namesake of Lady {[Sansa Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Sansa_Stark_\(daughter_of_Rickon\))}

**Lady Arya Stark**, a skinchanger, b. 287 AC  
—Second daughter of Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn  
—Namesake of her grandmother Lady {[Arya Flint](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Arya_Flint)}

**Brandon Stark**, called Bran, a skinchanger and a greenseer who has yet to open his third eye, b. 288 AC  
—Second son of Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn  
—Namesake of his uncle {Brandon Stark}

**Lady Lyanna Stark**, a warg, b. 290 AC  
—Third daughter of Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn  
—Namesake of her aunt Lady {Lyanna Stark}

**Rickon Stark**, a warg, b. 292 AC  
—Third son of Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn  
—Namesake of his grandfather Lord {Rickard Stark}

**Lady Lorra Stark**, a warg, b. 295 AC  
—Fourth daughter of Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn  
—Namesake of her great-great-great-grandmother Lady {[Lorra Royce](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Lorra_Royce)}

**Jon Snow**, a warg and a dragonrider, b. 281 AC  
—Nephew of Lord Eddard, raised as his bastard son, in truth the trueborn son of Lady {Lyanna Stark} and Prince {Rhaegar Targaryen}  
—Namesake of Jon Arryn, Lord of the Eyrie, Warden of the West and Hand of the King

**Alysanne Snow**, called Aly, a warg and a dragonrider, b. 281 AC  
—Niece of Lord Eddard, raised as his bastard daughter, in truth the trueborn daughter of Lady {Lyanna Stark} and Prince {Rhaegar Targaryen}  
—Namesake of her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Lady {[Alysanne Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Alysanne_Blackwood)}, née Blackwood

**Frostfyre**, **Steelsong**, and **Proudwing**, dragons clutched by {[Vermax](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Vermax)} c. 129 AC and hatched by Aly c. 287 AC

**Theon Greyjoy**, b. 278 AC  
—Heir to the Iron Islands  
—Only living son of Lord Balon Greyjoy and Lady [Alannys Greyjoy](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Alannys_Harlaw), née Harlaw  
—Ward and hostage of House Stark in the aftermath of the Greyjoy Rebellion c. 289 AC  
—Namesake of King {[Theon Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Theon_Stark)}, called the Hungry Wolf, a King in the North

**Benjen Stark**, called Ben, b. 266 AC  
—Third son of Lord {Rickard Stark} and Lady {Lyarra Stark}  
—First Ranger of the Night’s Watch, stationed at Castle Black in the shadow of the Wall

* * *

**☙ Great Houses ❧**

* * *

HOUSE BOLTON OF THE DREADFORT, principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

**Lord Roose Bolton**, called the Leech Lord, b. 254 AC  
—Head of House Bolton  
—Lord of the Dreadfort and Warden of the Weeping Water  
—Twice widowed and predeceased by sons who died still in the cradle

**Lady Wynne Bolton**, née Dustin, a skinchanger, greenseer, dragonrider and mage, b. 280 AC  
—Lady of the Dreadfort, heir to Barrowton and Harrenhal, and Bride of Trees  
—Third wife of Lord Roose  
—Only daughter of Lord {[Willam Dustin](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Willam_Dustin)} and Lady Barbrey Dustin, née Ryswell, Lady of Barrowton and Wardeness of the Saltspear  
—Fostered on the Isle of Faces c. 288 AC-292 AC

**Domeric Bolton**, b. 277 AC  
—Heir to the Dreadfort  
—Only son of Lord Roose by his second wife, Lady {[Bethany Bolton](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Bethany_Bolton)}, née Ryswell  
—Betrothed to Lady Sansa  
—Page in service to his aunt at Barrow Hall c. 284 AC-288 AC  
—Squire in service to his uncle at the Redfort c. 289 AC-292 AC

**Vermithora**, a dragonling clutched by {Vermax} c. 129 AC and hatched c. 297 AC  
—Namesake of {[Vermithor](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Vermithor)}, the Bronze Fury

HOUSE MANDERLY OF WHITE HARBOR, principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

[**Lord Wyman Manderly**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Wyman_Manderly), a widower  
—Head of House Manderly  
—Lord of White Harbor, Warden of the White Knife, Shield of the Faith, Defender of the Dispossessed, Lord Marshal of the Mander, and a Knight of the Order of the Green Hand  
—Only son of Lord {Warrick Manderly} and Lady {[Berena Manderly](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Berena_Stark)}, née Stark

[**Ser Wylis Manderly**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Wylis_Manderly)  
—Heir to White Harbor  
—Eldest son of Lord Wyman and Lady {Robyn Manderly}, née Dustin

[**Lady Leona Manderly**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Leona_Woolfield), née Woolfield  
—Lady of White Harbor  
—Wife of Ser Wylis

[**Lady Wynafryd Manderly**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Wynafryd_Manderly), b. 281 AC  
—Eldest daughter of Ser Wylis and Lady Leona

[**Lady Wylla Manderly**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Wylla_Manderly), b. 284 AC  
—Second daughter of Ser Wylis and Lady Leona

[**Ser Wendel Manderly**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Wendel_Manderly)  
—Second son of Lord Wyman and Lady {Robyn Manderly}, née Dustin

[**Ser Marlon Manderly**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Marlon_Manderly)  
—Commander of the garrison at New Castle in White Harbor  
—Only son of Ser {Medrick Manderly}  
—Cousin to Lord Wyman

**Lady Lynara Manderly**, née Stark  
—Wife of Ser Marlon  
—Eldest daughter of {[Brandon Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Brandon_Stark_\(son_of_Artos\))}[a]

**Ser Wayland Manderly**  
—Master-at-arms in service at the Dreadfort  
—Only son of Ser Marlon and Lady Lynara

[HOUSE DUSTIN OF BARROWTON](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Dustin), principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

[**Lady Barbrey Dustin**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Barbrey_Dustin), née Ryswell, b. 261 AC  
—Head of House Dustin  
—Lady of Barrowton and Wardeness of the Saltspear  
—Widow of Lord {Willam Dustin}  
—Second daughter of Lord Rodrik Ryswell and Lady Wylma Ryswell, née Manderly  
—Namesake of her grandmother {Barba Ryswell}, née Slate

**Willifer Dustin**, an archmaester of the Citadel known as the Polemologist  
—Third son of Lord {Alyn Dustin} and Lady {[Alysanne Dustin](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Alysanne_Stark)}, née Stark  
—Uncle to Lord {Willam Dustin}

[HOUSE RYSWELL OF THE RILLS](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Ryswell), principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

[**Lord Rodrik Ryswell**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Rodrik_Ryswell)  
—Head of House Ryswell  
—Lord of the Rills and Warden of Blazewater Bay  
—Eldest son of Lord {Rennard Ryswell} and Lady {Barba Ryswell}, née Slate

**Lady Wylma Ryswell**, née Manderly  
—Lady of the Rills  
—Wife of Lord Rodrik  
—Only daughter of Lord {Warrick Manderly} and Lady {Berena Manderly}, née Stark

**Reynard Ryswell**  
—Eldest son of {Malcolm Ryswell}  
—Nephew to Lord Rodrik

**Rostik Ryswell**  
—Second son of {Malcolm Ryswell}  
—Nephew to Lord Rodrik

**Radomir Ryswell**  
—Eldest son of {Ryland Ryswell}  
—Nephew to Lord Rodrik

**Rhys Ryswell**  
—Second son of {Ryland Ryswell}  
—Nephew to Lord Rodrik

HOUSE KARSTARK OF KARHOLD, principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

**Lord Rickard Karstark**  
—Head of House Karstark  
—Lord of Karhold  
—Only son of Lord {Donnor Karstark}

**Lady Regan Karstark**, née Umber  
—Lady of Karhold  
—Wife of Lord Rickard  
—Second daughter of [Mors Umber](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Mors_Umber) and Lady {Amaryllis Umber}, née Manderly

[**Harrion Karstark**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Harrion_Karstark), called Harry, b. 270 AC  
—Heir to Karhold  
—Eldest son of Lord Rickard and Lady Regan

[**Eddard Karstark**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Eddard_Karstark), called Edd, b. 273 AC  
—Second son of Lord Rickard and Lady Regan

[**Torrhen Karstark**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Torrhen_Karstark), called Torr, b. 276 AC  
—Third son of Lord Rickard and Lady Regan

[**Harald Karstark**](https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Harald_Karstark), called Hal, b. 279 AC  
—Fourth son of Lord Rickard and Lady Regan

**Lady Alys Karstark**, b. 282 AC  
—Only daughter of Lord Rickard and Lady Regan

[**Arnolf Karstark**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Arnolf_Karstark)  
—Castellan of Karhold  
—Uncle to Lord Rickard

[**Cregan Karstark**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Cregan_Karstark)  
—Eldest son of Arnolf  
—Twice widowed

[**Arthor Karstark**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Arthor_Karstark)  
—Second son of Arnolf

**Arnold Karstark**[b]  
—Eldest son of Arthor

**Dorren Karstark**[b]  
—Second son of Arthor

**Errold Karstark**[b]  
—Third son of Arthor

HOUSE UMBER OF THE LAST HEARTH, principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

**Lord Jon Umber**, called the Greatjon  
—Head of House Umber  
—Lord of the Last Hearth  
—Eldest son of Lord {Harkon Umber}

**Lady Sabina Umber**, née Karstark  
—Lady of the Last Hearth  
—Wife of the Greatjon  
—Eldest daughter of Arnolf[b]

**Jon Umber**, called the Smalljon  
—Heir to the Last Hearth  
—Eldest son of the Greatjon and Lady Sabina

[**Eddard Umber**](https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Ned_Umber), called Ned, b. 288 AC  
—Only son of the Smalljon  
—Namesake of Ned Stark

**Karlon Umber**[c]  
—Second son of the Greatjon and Lady Sabina

**Lady Agatha Umber**[c]  
—Only daughter of the Greatjon and Lady Sabina

**Harlon Umber**[c]  
—Third son of the Greatjon and Lady Sabina

**Cedric Umber**[c]  
—Younger brother of the Greatjon

**Gareth Umber**[c]  
—Younger brother of the Greatjon

**Mors Umber**, called Mors Crowfood  
—Castellan of the Last Hearth  
—Widowed and predeceased by his sons and elder daughter  
—Uncle to the Greatjon

[**Hother Umber**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Hother_Umber), called Whoresbane  
—Castellan of the Last Hearth  
—Widowed  
—Uncle to the Greatjon

[HOUSE LOCKE OF OLDCASTLE](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Locke), principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

[**Lord Ondrew Locke**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Ondrew_Locke)  
—Head of House Locke  
—Lord of Oldcastle  
—Eldest son of Lord {Sylvester Locke} and Lady {Eanna Locke}, née Dustin

**Lady Helena Locke**, née Stark  
—Lady of Oldcastle  
—Wife of Lord Ondrew  
—Eldest daughter of {[Benjen Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Benjen_Stark_\(son_of_Artos\))}[a]

[**Ser Donnel Locke**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Donnel_Locke)  
—Heir to Oldcastle  
—Eldest son of Lord Ondrew and Lady Helena

**Ser Edrick Locke**[d]  
—Knight in service to Lord Wyman at the Merman’s Court  
—Second son of Lord Ondrew and Lady Helena

[**Ser Mallador Locke**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Mallador_Locke)  
—Third son of Lord Ondrew and Lady Helena  
—Ranger in service at Castle Black

[**Locke Snow**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Locke)  
—Master of the Hunt in service at the Dreadfort  
—Bastard son of Lord Ondrew by a lowborn widow

[HOUSE SLATE OF BLACKPOOL](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Slate), principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

**Lord Rorge Slate**  
—Head of House Slate  
—Lord of Blackpool

* * *

**☙ Other Principal Houses ❧**

* * *

[HOUSE CERWYN OF CERWYN](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Cerwyn), principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

[**Lord Medger Cerwyn**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Medger_Cerwyn)  
—Head of House Cerwyn  
—Lord of Cerwyn

**Lady Agnora Cerwyn**, née Karstark  
—Lady of Cerwyn  
—Wife of Lord Medger  
—Second daughter of Arnolf[b]

[**Lady Jonelle Cerwyn**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Jonelle_Cerwyn), b. 267 AC  
—Only daughter of Lord Medger and Lady Agnora

[**Cley Cerwyn**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Cley_Cerwyn), b. 282 AC  
—Heir to Cerwyn  
—Only son of Lord Medger and Lady Agnora

[HOUSE HORNWOOD OF THE HORNWOOD](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Hornwood), principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

[**Lord Halys Hornwood**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Halys_Hornwood)  
—Head of House Hornwood  
—Lord of the Hornwood

[**Daryn Hornwood**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Daryn_Hornwood)  
—Heir to the Hornwood  
—Only son of Lord Halys and Lady {[Donella Hornwood](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Donella_Hornwood)}, née Manderly

[**Larence Snow**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Larence_Snow), b. 284 AC  
—Bastard son of Lord Halys  
—Fostered at Deepwood Motte

[HOUSE WHITEHILL OF HIGHPOINT](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Whitehill), principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

**Lord Ludd Whitehill**  
—Head of House Whitehill  
—Lord of Highpoint

**Ebbert Whitehill**  
—Second son of Lord Ludd  
—Studying at the Citadel

**Torrhen Whitehill**  
—Heir to Highpoint  
—Third son of Lord Ludd

**Lady Gwyn Whitehill**  
—Only daughter of Lord Ludd

**Gryff Whitehill**  
—Fourth son of Lord Ludd

HOUSE MORMONT OF BEAR ISLAND, principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

[**Lady Maege Mormont**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Maege_Mormont), called the She-Bear  
—Head of House Mormont  
—Lady of Bear Island

[**Lady Dacey Mormont**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Dacey_Mormont), a skinchanger, b. 270 AC  
—Heir to Bear Island  
—Eldest daughter of Lady Maege and Tormund Giantsbane

**Melantha Snow**, called Mel, b. 278 AC  
—Bastard daughter of {Brandon Stark} and Lady Barbrey  
—Fostered at Mormont Keep c. 286 AC-294 AC  
—Paramour of Lady Dacey  
—Namesake of her great-great-grandmother Lady {[Melantha Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Melantha_Blackwood)}, née Blackwood

[**Lady Alysane Mormont**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Alysane_Mormont), a skinchanger, b. 275 AC  
—Second daughter of Lady Maege and Tormund Giantsbane

**Lady Arra Mormont**, b. 291 AC[e]  
—Only daughter of Lady Alysane

**Alaric Mormont**, called Ric, b. 298 AC[e]  
—Only son of Lady Alysane

[**Lady Lyra Mormont**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Lyra_Mormont), a skinchanger, b. 280 AC  
—Third daughter of Lady Maege and Tormund Giantsbane

[**Lady Jorelle Mormont**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Jorelle_Mormont), called Jory, a skinchanger, b. 285 AC  
—Fourth daughter of Lady Maege and Tormund Giantsbane

**Lady Lyanna Mormont**, a skinchanger, b. 290 AC  
—Fifth daughter of Lady Maege and Tormund Giantsbane

**Jeor Mormont**, called the Old Bear  
—Elder brother of Lady Maege  
—Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch

[HOUSE FLINT OF WIDOW’S WATCH](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Flint_of_Widow%27s_Watch), principal bannermen sworn to House Stark, a cadet branch of House Flint of Breakstone Hill

[**Lady Lyessa Flint**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Lyessa_Flint)  
—Head of House Flint of Widow’s Watch  
—Lady of Widow’s Watch  
—Former lady-in-waiting to {Lyanna Stark}

**Lord Ryam Flint**  
—Lord of Widow’s Watch  
—Husband and cousin of Lady Lyessa

**Lady Branda Flint**  
—Heir to Widow’s Watch  
—Eldest daughter of Lady Lyessa and Lord Ryam

**Lady Arsa Flint**  
—Second daughter of Lady Lyessa and Lord Ryam  
—Namesake of {[Arsa Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Arsa_Stark)}

[**Ser Byam Flint**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Byam_Flint)  
—Ranger of the Night’s Watch  
—Knight in service at the Shadow Tower

[HOUSE FLINT OF FLINT’S FINGER](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Flint_of_Flint%27s_Finger), principal bannermen sworn to House Stark, a cadet branch of House Flint of Breakstone Hill

[**Lord Robin Flint**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Robin_Flint)  
—Head of House Flint of Flint’s Finger  
—Lord of Flint’s Finger  
—Only son of Lady Lyessa and Lord Ryam

* * *

**☙ Greater Masterly Houses ❧**

* * *

[HOUSE GLOVER OF DEEPWOOD MOTTE](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Glover), principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

[**Galbart Glover**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Galbart_Glover)  
—Master of Deepwood Motte  
—Widowed

[**Robett Glover**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Robett_Glover)  
—Heir to Deepwood Motte  
—Younger brother of Galbart

[**Lady Sybelle Glover**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Sybelle_Glover), née Locke  
—Lady of Deepwood Motte  
—Wife of Robett  
—Only daughter of Lord Ondrew and Lady Helena

[**Gawen Glover**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Gawen_Glover), b. 295 AC  
—Only son of Robett and Lady Sybelle

[**Erena Glover**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Erena_Glover), b. 297 AC  
—Only daughter of Robett and Lady Sybelle

[HOUSE TALLHART OF TORRHEN’S SQUARE](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Tallhart), principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

[**Ser Helman Tallhart**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Helman_Tallhart)  
—Head of House Tallhart  
—Master of Torrhen’s Square  
—Eldest son of {Brandon Tallhart} and Lady {Arta Stark}

**Lady Emeline Tallhart**, née Manderly  
—Lady of Torrhen’s Square  
—Wife of Ser Helman  
—Eldest daughter of Ser Marlon and Lady Lynara

[**Benfred Tallhart**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Benfred_Tallhart), b. 280 AC  
—Heir to Torrhen’s Square  
—Only son of Ser Helman and Lady Emeline

[**Lady Eddara Tallhart**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Eddara_Tallhart), b. 287 AC  
—Only daughter of Ser Helman and Lady Emeline

[**Leobald Tallhart**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Leobald_Tallhart)  
—Castellan of Torrhen’s Square  
—Second son of {Brandon Tallhart} and Lady {Arta Stark}

[**Lady Berena Tallhart**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Berena_Hornwood), née Hornwood  
—Wife of Leobald  
—Younger sister of Lord Halys

[**Brandon Tallhart**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Brandon_Tallhart), b. 282 AC  
—Eldest son of Leobald and Lady Berena  
—Namesake of his grandfather {Brandon Tallhart}

[**Beren Tallhart**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Beren_Tallhart), b. 287 AC  
—Second son of Leobald and Lady Berena  
—Namesake of his mother

HOUSE RYSWELL OF WOODSEDGE, a cadet branch of House Ryswell of the Rills

[**Ser Roger Ryswell**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Roger_Ryswell), the Knight of Woodsedge  
—Heir to the Rills  
—Master of Woodsedge  
—Second son of Lord Rodrik and Lady Wylma

[**Lady Walda Ryswell**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Walda_Frey_\(daughter_of_Walton\)), called Fair Walda, née Frey, b. 280 AC  
—Lady of Woodsedge  
—Second wife of Ser Roger  
—Only daughter of [Ser Walton Frey](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Walton_Frey) and [Lady Deana Frey](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Deana_Hardyng), née Hardyng

**Lady Raelyne Ryswell**, b. 278 AC  
—Heir to Woodsedge  
—Wife of Cregard Snow  
—Only daughter of Ser Roger by his first wife, Lady {Fenella Tallhart}

**Cregard Snow**, called Cre, b. 277 AC  
—Bastard son of {Brandon Stark} by Lady Barbrey  
—Ward of Ser Roger  
—Husband of Lady Raelyne  
—Namesake of {[Cregard Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Cregard_Stark)}

**Bennard Ryswell**, called Ben, b. 297 AC  
—Infant son of Cregard and Lady Raelyne

HOUSE RYSWELL OF MUNDBURG, a cadet branch of House Ryswell of the Rills

[**Ser Rickard Ryswell**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Rickard_Ryswell), the Knight of Mundburg  
—Master of Mundburg  
—Third son of Lord Rodrik and Lady Wylma  
—Namesake of Lord {Rickard Stark}

[**Lady Tyta Ryswell**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Tyta_Frey), née Frey  
—Lady of Mundburg  
—Wife of Ser Rickard  
—Second daughter of Lord Walder Frey by Lady {[Alyssa Blackwood](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Alyssa_Blackwood)}  
—Formerly known as Tyta the Maid

HOUSE RYSWELL OF COLDFELLS, a cadet branch of House Ryswell of the Rills

[**Ser Roose Ryswell**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Roose_Ryswell), the Knight of Coldfells  
—Master of Coldfells  
—Fourth son of Lord Rodrik and Lady Wylma  
—Namesake of Lord Roose

[**Lady Alyx Ryswell**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Alyx_Frey), née Frey, b. 280 AC  
—Lady of Coldfells  
—Wife of Ser Roose  
—Only daughter of Ser [Symond Frey](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Symond_Frey) and Lady [Betharios of Braavos](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Betharios_of_Braavos)

* * *

**☙ Lesser Noble Houses ❧**

* * *

[HOUSE LAKE OF THIRLMERE](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Lake_\(north\)), landed vassals of House Stark

[HOUSE LONG OF GRIZEDALE](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Long), landed vassals of House Stark

[HOUSE HOLT OF THE HOLT TOWER](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Holt_\(north\)), landed vassals of House Bolton

**Lord Peredur Holt**  
—Head of House Holt  
—Lord of the Holt Tower

**Lady Ragna Holt**, née Ryswell  
—Lady of the Holt Tower  
—Wife of Lord Peredur  
—Eldest daughter of {Ryland Ryswell}  
—Niece of Lord Rodrik

**Ser Rennard Holt**, b. 274 AC  
—Heir to the Holt Tower  
—Eldest son of Lord Peredur and Lady Ragna  
—Namesake of his great-grandfather {Rennard Ryswell}

**Lady Kenna Holt**, b. 278 AC  
—Only daughter of Lord Peredur and Lady Ragna  
—Lady-in-waiting to Lady Wynne

**Phineas Holt**, b. 282 AC  
—Second son of Lord Peredur and Lady Ragna  
—Page in service at the Dreadfort

**Ser Erskine Holt**  
—Castellan of the Dreadfort  
—Younger brother of Lord Peredur

[**Ser Maynard Holt**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Maynard_Holt)  
—Younger brother of Lord Peredur  
—Ranger of the Night’s Watch  
—Knight in service at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea  
—Captain of the _Talon_

[HOUSE WATERMAN OF ETHERING](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Waterman), landed vassals of House Bolton

**Lady Mifanwy Waterman**  
—Head of House Waterman  
—Lady Regnant of Ethering

**Lord Bertram Waterman**  
—Lord of Ethering  
—Lord Steward of the Dreadfort  
—Husband of Lady Mifanwy  
—Fourth son of a merchant from Gulltown in the Vale and Lady Alethea Arryn

**Lady Penthea Waterman**, called Thea, b. 280 AC  
—Only daughter of Lady Mifanwy and Lord Bertram  
—Lady-in-waiting to Lady Wynne

[HOUSE OVERTON OF THE SHEEPSHEAD HILLS](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Overton), landed vassals of House Manderly

**Lord Brandon Overton**  
—Head of House Overton  
—Lord of Overton

[HOUSE WOOLFIELD OF RAMSGATE](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Woolfield), landed vassals of House Manderly

[HOUSE STOUT OF GOLDGRASS](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Stout), landed vassals of House Dustin

[**Lord Harwood Stout**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Harwood_Stout)  
—Head of House Stout  
—Lord of Goldgrass  
—Widowed

[**Ronnel Stout**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Ronnel_Stout)  
—Heir to Goldgrass  
—Only son of Lord Harwood and Lady {Wylda Stout}, née Ashwood

**Lady Ellara Stout**  
—Only daughter of Lord Harwood and Lady {Wylda Stout}, née Ashwood  
—Lady-in-waiting to Lady Wynne

[**Ser Wynton Stout**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Wynton_Stout)  
—Younger brother of Lord Harwood  
—Ranger of the Night’s Watch

**Lady Eiralys Stout**  
—Castellan of Barrow Hall  
—Younger sister of Lord Harwood

[HOUSE ASHWOOD OF THE ASHWOOD](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Ashwood), landed vassals of House Dustin

**Lord Ackerly Ashwood**  
—Head of House Ashwood  
—Lord of Narrowleaf

**Lady Rowanne Ashwood**, née Ryswell  
—Lady of Narrowleaf  
—Wife of Lord Ackerly  
—Only daughter of {Malcolm Ryswell}

**Islwyn Ashwood**, b. 288 AC  
—Heir to Narrowleaf  
—Only son of Lord Ackerly and Lady Rowanne

**Lady Ornella Ashwood**, b. 290 AC  
—Eldest daughter of Lord Ackerly and Lady Rowanne

**Lady Lucina Ashwood**, b. 292 AC  
—Second daughter of Lord Ackerly and Lady Rowanne

**Lady Alameda Ashwood**  
—Seneschal of Lady Barbrey  
—Elder sister of Lord Ackerly

[HOUSE GLENMORE OF RILLWATER CROSSING](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Glenmore_\(Telltale\)), landed vassals of House Ryswell

**Lord Ronald Glenmore**  
—Head of House Glenmore  
—Lord of Rillwater Crossing

**Edmund Glenmore**  
—Heir to Rillwater Crossing  
—Eldest son of Lord Ronald

**Lady Elaena Glenmore**  
—Only daughter of Lord Ronald  
—Betrothed to Rodrik Forrester

**Arthur Glenmore**  
—Second son of Lord Ronald  
—Commander of the household guard at Rillwater Crossing

[HOUSE IRONSMITH OF BLAZEWATER BAY](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Ironsmith), landed vassals of House Ryswell

**Lord Einarr Ironsmith**  
—Head of House Ironsmith  
—Lord of Tantallon

**Lady Jerika Ironsmith**  
—Younger sister of Lord Einarr  
—Former lady-in-waiting to Lady {Bethany Bolton}, née Ryswell

[HOUSE LIGHTFOOT OF THE GREY HILLS](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Lightfoot), landed vassals of House Karstark

**Lord Lambard Lightfoot**  
—Head of House Lightfoot  
—Lord of Balmoral

[HOUSE WELLS OF THE WINTERWOOD](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Wells_\(north\)), landed vassals of House Karstark

**Lord Edwald Wells**  
—Head of House Wells  
—Lord of Eastmelt

[HOUSE FORRESTER OF IRONRATH](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Forrester), landed vassals of House Glover

**Lord Gregor Forrester**  
—Head of House Forrester  
—Lord of Ironrath  
—Only son of Lord {Thorren Forrester}

[**Lady Elissa Forrester**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Branfield_\(Telltale\)), née Branfield  
—Lady of Ironrath  
—Wife of Lord Gregor  
—Younger daughter of Lady {Talia Branfield}

**Rodrik Forrester**  
—Heir to Ironrath  
—Eldest son of Lord Gregor and Lady Elissa  
—Betrothed to Lady Elaena Glenmore

**Asher Forrester**  
—Second son  
—Exiled to Essos by his father

**Lady Mira Forrester**  
—Eldest daughter of Lord Gregor and Lady Elissa  
—Lady-in-waiting to Lady Catelyn

**Ethan Forrester**  
—Third son of Lord Gregor and Lady Elissa

**Lady Talia Forrester**  
—Second daughter of Lord Gregor and Lady Elissa  
—Namesake of her grandmother Lady {Talia Branfield}

**Ryon Forrester**  
—Fourth son of Lord Gregor and Lady Elissa

**Ser Malcolm Branfield**  
—Only living son of Lady {Talia Branfield}, the last of his line

[HOUSE BOLE OF KING’S GROVE](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Bole), landed vassals of House Glover

[HOUSE BRANCH OF ACORN GROVE](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Branch), landed vassals of House Glover

[**Lord Benjicot Branch**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Benjicot_Branch)  
—Head of House Branch  
—Lord of Acorn Grove

* * *

**☙ Lesser Masterly Houses and Landed Knights ❧**

* * *

[HOUSE CASSEL OF KING’S COURSE](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Cassel), vassals of House Stark

**Ser Lonnel Cassel**, the Knight of King’s Course  
—Head of House Cassel  
—Master of King’s Course  
—Former page of Lord {[Edwyle Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Edwyle_Stark)}

**Ser Rodrik Cassel**  
—Master-at-arms at Winterfell  
—Second son of Ser Lonnel Cassel, a descendant of {[Lonnel Snow](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Lonnel_Snow)}, the bastard son of Lord {[Brandon Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Brandon_Stark_\(son_of_Cregan\))} and Lady {[Wylla Fenn](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Wylla_Fenn)}  
—Widowed

[**Beth Cassel**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Beth_Cassel), b. 289 AC  
—Only living daughter of Ser Rodrik  
—Handmaiden to Lady Lyanna

**Jory Cassel**, b. 273 AC  
—Heir to King’s Course  
—Only son of Ser {[Martyn Cassel](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Martyn_Cassel)}

[HOUSE MOLLEN OF DAWNFOREST](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Mollen), vassals of House Stark

**Brandon Mollen**  
—Head of House Mollen  
—Master of Dawnforest

[**Hallis Mollen**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Hallis_Mollen), called Hal  
—Younger brother of Brandon  
—Captain of the guard at Winterfell

[HOUSE POOLE OF THE WINTER TOWN](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Poole), vassals of House Stark

[**Vayon Poole**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Vayon_Poole)  
—Head of House Poole  
—Steward of Winterfell

**Lady Ossia Poole**, née Lake  
—Wife of Vayon  
—Mother of Jeyne  


[**Jeyne Poole**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Jeyne_Poole)  
—Only daughter of Vayon and Ossia  
—Handmaiden to Sansa

[HOUSE CONDON OF CONDON](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Condon), vassals of House Cerwyn

[**Ser Kyle Condon**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Kyle_Condon), the Knight of Condon  
—Head of House Condon  
—Knight in service at Castle Cerwyn

[HOUSE MOSS OF GROVESEND](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Moss), vassals of House Glover

[HOUSE WOODS OF GREATGLEN](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Woods), vassals of House Glover

* * *

**☙ Northern Mountain Clans ❧**

* * *

[HOUSE FLINT OF BREAKSTONE HILL](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Flint_of_the_mountains), sworn to House Stark

[**Lord Torghen Flint**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Torghen_Flint), called the Flint or Old Flint  
—Head of House Flint of Breakstone Hill  
—Lord of Breakstone Hill  
—Widowed and remarried

[**Donnel Flint**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Donnel_Flint), called Black Donnel  
—Heir to Breakstone Hill  
—Eldest son of Lord Torghen

[**Artos Flint**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Artos_Flint)  
—Second son of Lord Torghen  
—Namesake of {[Artos Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Artos_Stark)}

[HOUSE BURLEY OF TORRIDON HILL](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Burley), sworn to House Stark

**Lord Lothor Burley**, called the Burley  
—Head of House Burley  
—Lord of Torridon Hill  
—Namesake of {[Lothor Burley](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Lothor_Burley)}

[HOUSE HARCLAY OF BLUE MOON HILL](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Harclay), sworn to House Stark

**Lord Jonnel Harclay**, called the Harclay  
—Head of House Harclay  
—Lord of Blue Moon Hill

**Lady Rynora Harclay**, née Flint  
—Lady of Blue Moon Hill  
—Wife of Lord Jonnel  
—Younger sister of Lord Ryam Flint

**Ellard Harclay**  
—Heir to Blue Moon Hill  
—Eldest son of Lord Jonnel

[**Ronnel Harclay**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Ronnel_Harclay)  
—Second son of Lord Jonnel  
—Ranger of the Night’s Watch

[HOUSE KNOTT OF ARRENDELL](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Knott), sworn to House Stark

**Lord Barthogan Knott**, called the Knott or Barth  
—Head of House Knott  
—Lord of Arrendell

**Morven Knott**  
—Heir to Arrendell  
—Only son of Lord Barth

[HOUSE LIDDLE OF PINESEND](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Liddle), sworn to House Stark

[**Lord Torren Liddle**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Torren_Liddle), called the Liddle  
—Head of House Liddle  
—Lord of Pinesend

[**Duncan Liddle**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Duncan_Liddle), called Big Liddle  
—Eldest son of Lord Torren  
—Ranger of the Night’s Watch

[**Morgan Liddle**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Morgan_Liddle), called Middle Liddle  
—Heir to Pinesend  
—Second son of Lord Torren

[**Rickard Liddle**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Rickard_Liddle), called Little Liddle  
—Third son of Lord Torren  
—Namesake of Lord {Rickard Stark}

[HOUSE NORREY OF SHADOWMOOR](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Norrey), sworn to House Stark

[**Lord Brandon Norrey**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Brandon_Norrey), called the Norrey or the Elder  
—Head of House Norrey  
—Lord of Shadowmoor

[**Brandon Norrey**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Brandon_Norrey_\(son_of_Brandon\)), called the Younger  
—Heir to Shadowmoor  
—Eldest son of Lord Brandon

[**Owen Norrey**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Owen_Norrey)  
—Second son of Lord Brandon

[HOUSE WULL OF CROW’S EDGE](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Wull), sworn to House Stark

[**Lord Hugo Wull**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Hugo_Wull), called the Wull or Big Bucket  
—Head of House Wull  
—Lord of Crow’s Edge

* * *

**☙ Crannogmen of the Neck ❧**

* * *

[HOUSE REED OF GREYWATER WATCH](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Reed), principal bannermen sworn to House Stark

**Lord Howland Reed**  
—Head of House Reed  
—Lord of Greywater Watch

[**Lady Jyana Reed**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Jyana), née Greengood  
—Lady of Greywater Watch  
—Wife of Lord Howland

**Lady Meera Reed**, b. 281 AC  
—Only daughter of Lord Howland and Lady Jyana

**Jojen Reed**, b. 284 AC  
—Heir to Greywater Watch  
—Only son of Lord Howland and Lady Jyana

[HOUSE BLACKMYRE OF BLACKMYRE](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Blackmyre), vassals of House Reed

**Lord Bohemund Blackmyre**  
—Head of House Blackmyre  
—Lord of Blackmyre

[HOUSE FENN OF SILVEREED](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Fenn), vassals of House Reed

**Lady Sherylle Fenn**  
—Head of House Fenn  
—Lady Regnant of Silvereed

[HOUSE MARSH OF CHURWELL](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Marsh), vassals of House Reed

**Lord Glavis Marsh**  
—Head of House Marsh  
—Lord of Churwell

[**Bowen Marsh**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Bowen_Marsh), called the Old Pomegranate  
—Uncle to Lord Glavis  
—Lord Steward of the Night’s Watch

[HOUSE BOGGS OF MUSKEG](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Boggs_\(north\)), vassals of House Reed

[HOUSE CRAY OF GREYCRANN](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Cray), vassals of House Reed

[HOUSE GREENGOOD OF GREENGOOD](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Greengood), vassals of House Reed

[HOUSE PEAT OF PEATSMOOR](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Peat), vassals of House Reed

[HOUSE QUAGG OF QUAGGMYRE](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Quagg), vassals of House Reed

* * *

**☙ Skagosi Island Clans ❧**

* * *

[HOUSE CROWL OF DEEPDOWN](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Crowl), sworn to House Stark

**Lord Odger Crowl**  
—Head of House Crowl  
—Lord of Deepdown  
—Uncle to Lord Roose

**Arnne Crowl**  
—Heir to Deepdown  
—Only son of Lord Odger

**Thyra Crowl**  
—Only daughter of Lord Odger

[HOUSE MAGNAR OF KINGSHOUSE](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Magnar), sworn to House Stark

[HOUSE STANE OF DRIFTWOOD HALL](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Stane), sworn to House Stark

**Lord Alviss Stane**  
—Head of House Stane  
—Lord of Driftwood Hall  
—Fostered Lord Roose c. 262 AC-268 AC

* * *

**☙ Exiled Noble Houses ❧**

* * *

[HOUSE BLACKWOOD OF THE BLACKWOOD](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Blackwood), who ruled the wolfswood for centuries before the Kings of Winter drove them out

* * *

**☙ Extinct Noble Houses ❧**

* * *

[HOUSE AMBER OF CAPE KRAKEN](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Amber), vanquished by the Kings of Winter

[HOUSE FROST OF THE GREY CLIFFS](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Frost), vanquished by the Kings of Winter

[HOUSE GREENWOOD OF SEA DRAGON POINT](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Greenwood), vanquished by the Kings of Winter

[HOUSE TOWERS OF MOAT CAILIN](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Towers_\(north\)), vanquished by the Kings of Winter

[HOUSE WOODFOOT OF BEAR ISLAND](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Woodfoot), extinguished by the ironborn

[HOUSE RYDER OF THE RILLS](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Ryder), vanquished by the Kings in the North

[HOUSE FISHER OF THE STONY SHORE](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Fisher_of_the_Stony_Shore), vanquished by the Kings in the North

[HOUSE GREYSTARK OF THE WOLF’S DEN](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/House_Greystark), vanquished by the Kings in the North

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many of the families listed here are only mentioned canonically, so I scrumped the names for their ancestral seats from things like actual Scottish castles and forests. I am too lazy to make up names myself. SORRY NOT SORRY.
> 
> Also, w/r/t hierarchy: the term “great houses” is used interchangeably to mean either the ruling families of the Seven Kingdoms (i.e. Baratheon, Stark, Tully, Arryn, Lannister, Tyrell, Martell) or families that ruled as kings in their own right at some point in history. I’ve used the latter meaning. So the difference between a great noble house and a principal house is that one house is descended from royalty while the other is not. GRRM wrote a feudal class system where the social hierarchy is pretty straightforward:
> 
> {1} kings and queens  
{2} royal princes and princesses  
{3} lords paramount and wardens  
{4} high nobility  
{5} lesser nobility  
{6} landed knights and masterly houses  
{7} merchants  
{8} servants of the nobility  
{9} peasants or smallfolk
> 
> Which is less ridiculous than European gentry with the dukes and archdukes and earls and counts and viscounts and barons and baronets and marquesses and whatnot, not to mention the myriad permutations of feudal land tenure for European peasantry. GRRM has used other designations like marcher lord (i.e. a lord whose territory borders a neighboring kingdom, historically a title bestowed on a noble appointed by the King of England to guard the Welsh Marches on the borders of England and Wales, a precursor of sorts to the British title of marquess) as well, but this is less a specific hierarchical rank and more a descriptor of where that particular lord is located. Unlike the Anglo-Norman Marcher Lords, who ruled by _sicut regale_ (i.e. like a king) and were granted privileges that other lordships were not (e.g. building castles, administering their own laws, declaring and waging war, maintaining their own chanceries).
> 
> * * *
> 
> [a] Artos Stark is mentioned in _ACoK_, Bran VII and _ADwD_, Jon II and he appears on the family tree in _TWoIaF_ along with his two sons, Brandon and Benjen, both of whom had issue. Presumably daughters, since no cadet branches of House Stark canonically exist besides House Karstark and the extinct House Greystark.
> 
> [b] Arnolf Karstark has an unspecified number of daughters and six unnamed grandsons mentioned in _ADwD_, Jon IV.
> 
> [c] Greatjon Umber has brothers and sons besides the Smalljon who are unnamed but mentioned in _AGoT_, Bran VI and daughters who are unnamed but mentioned in _ADwD_, Jon IV.
> 
> [d] Ser Edrick Locke is canonically unnamed but mentioned in _ADwD_, Davos III.
> 
> [e] Alysane Mormont has two unnamed children mentioned in _ADwD_, The King’s Prize. If you’re curious about why Jorah isn’t listed here as a member of House Mormont, it’s because in this version of the story he wasn’t able to escape into exile and thus was executed in 293 AC.
> 
> Scholars and fans of Tolkien have created a term for characters such as these: textual ghosts.


	20. Appendix B

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
Appendix B: House Bolton, c. 297 AC

* * *

**☙ House Bolton of the Dreadfort ❧**

* * *

House Bolton stems from an old bloodline that runs back to the First Men known for their practices of torturing and flaying their enemies, exemplified by their house sigil of a red flayed man on a pink field strewn with drops of blood. Their founder was Ryana Redhand, a daughter of Garth Greenhand said to have bathed in blood to remain youthful and beautiful for centuries. Roose I Bolton, her only son, built the Dreadfort at the mouth of the Weeping Water and ruled as the first Red King. It was he whose threatening words became the family motto of House Bolton: _Our Blades Are Sharp_. Their unofficial family motto is _a naked man has few secrets, a flayed man none_.

In the days before the coming of the Andals, House Bolton ruled the lands from the Last River to the White Knife to the Sheepshead Hills for two thousand generations. Since the Long Night, a bitter rivalry festered between the Red Kings and the Kings of Winter. Red Kings sacked and burned Winterfell twice during the fabled Age of Heroes, whilst other Boltons wore the skins of Starks they flayed. Rogar the Huntsman, the last Red King of the Dreadfort, bent the knee to King Theon Stark, the Hungry Wolf, at the beginning of the Andal invasion. Together, the Starks and Boltons defeated the Andal warlord [Argos Sevenstar](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Argos_Sevenstar) at the [Battle of the Weeping Water](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Battle_of_the_Weeping_Water).

After the Andal invasion, the territory of House Bolton dwindled as House Stark gained more vassals. House Manderly was exiled from the Reach and offered sanctuary by the Starks a thousand years before the Conquest, who granted the former marshals of the Mander a huge portion of territory that had been ruled by House Bolton and House Locke of Oldcastle. After a Stark bastard was fostered by House Manderly at New Castle, he obtained knighthood and founded House Hornwood of the Hornwood.

Seven hundred years before the Conquest, House Bolton rose up against House Stark. Harlon Stark, the King in the North, besieged the Dreadfort and starved the Boltons out after two years. When the Boltons once again bent the knee to House Stark, they swore to give up their barbaric practices. However, rumor has it that Boltons still flay their prisoners in secret and maintain a hidden chamber in the Dreadfort where the skins of their enemies are displayed. Their territory now borders the Last River and Lonely Hills in the demense of House Umber, the Grey Hills and Winterwood in the demense of House Karstark, the Hornwood wherein lies the seat of House Hornwood, and on the banks of the White Knife where Bolton lands meet House Stark, House Cerwyn, and House Manderly territory.

House Bolton has only two vassals: House Waterman of Ethering, with holdings on the banks of the Weeping Water, and House Holt of the Holt Tower, built to guard the estuary where the river flows into the Shivering Sea from pirates and ironborn raiders. At the estuary there is a small port village populated by fishermen and fishwives, crabbers and clammers. This is where the Redroad that branches out from the Kingsroad toward the Dreadfort ends. House Bolton owns several garnet, silver, gold and iron mines, and the Weeping Water yields the crayfish, trout, cod, paperbelly, torgoch, squaretail, greyling, whitefish and steelhead while northern prawns, king crabs, bluefin tuna, flounder, salmon, haddock and halibut are fished off the coast of Bolton lands in the Shivering Sea. Most of the smallfolk on Bolton lands are millers, smiths, farmers, miners or fishermen.

In the aftermath of two rebellions and two epidemics, the male line of House Bolton has dwindled to only two members. Roose Bolton, Lord of the Dreadfort and Warden of the Weeping Water, has attempted to rectify the situation by taking a new bride.

* * *

**☙ Historical Boltons ❧**

* * *

**Ryana Bolton**, known as Ryana Redhand, a daughter of Garth Greenhand, the mythic founder of House Bolton (c. ~12,000 BC)

**King Roose I Bolton**, her only son, the first Red King, the one who built the Dreadfort (c. ~12,000 BC)

**King Royce I Bolton**, a Red King

**King **[**Royce II Bolton**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Royce_II_Bolton), a Red King who sacked and burned Winterfell (c. ~5,300 BC)

**King Royce III Bolton**, a Red King

**King **[**Royce IV Bolton**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Royce_IV_Bolton), known as Royce Redarm, a Red King who sacked and burned Winterfell (c. ~5,000 BC)

**King **[**Rogar Bolton**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Rogar_Bolton), known as Rogar the Huntsman, the last Red King (c. ~4,000 BC)

**Lord **[**Belthasar Bolton**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Belthasar_Bolton), the Lord of the Dreadfort who participated in the [Rape of the Three Sisters](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Rape_of_the_Three_Sisters) by the Kings of Winter (c. ~1,800 BC)

**Queen Ryana Stark**, née Bolton, Queen in the North, wife of King [Harlon Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Harlon_Stark) and mother of King [Brandon Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Brandon_Stark_\(Ice_Eyes\)), known as Ice Eyes (c. ~700 BC)

**Lady **[**Barba Dustin**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Barba_Bolton), née Bolton, a maiden at the [Maiden’s Day Cattle Show](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Maiden%27s_Day_Cattle_Show) (c. 133 AC)

**Lord Benedick Bolton**, a Lord of the Dreadfort (c. 157 AC)

**Lady **[**Raya Bolton**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Raya_Stark), née Stark, his wife, daughter of Lord [Cregan Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Cregan_Stark) and Lady [Alysanne Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Alysanne_Blackwood), née Blackwood (c. 157 AC)

**Lord Domnall Bolton**, a Lord of the Dreadfort (c. 184 AC)

**Lady **[**Arsa Bolton**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Arsa_Stark), née Stark, his cousin and wife, daughter of Lord [Brandon Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Brandon_Stark_\(son_of_Cregan\)) and Lady [Alys Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Alys_Karstark_\(wife_of_Brandon\)), née Karstark (c. 184 AC)

**Lord Robar Bolton**, a Lord of the Dreadfort, father of Roose Bolton (d. 272 AC)

**Lady Revna Bolton**, née Crowl, a Lady of the Dreadfort, mother of Roose Bolton (d. 268 AC)

* * *

**☙ House Bolton, c. 297 AC ❧**

* * *

**Lord Roose Bolton**, called the Leech Lord, b. 254 AC**  
**—Head of House Bolton  
—Lord of the Dreadfort and Warden of the Weeping Water  
—Only son of Lord {Robar Bolton} and Lady {Revna Bolton}, née Crowl

Lady {Romilda Bolton}, née Royce, 250 AC-272 AC  
—First wife and cousin of Lord Roose, died of winter fever, without issue  
—Second daughter of Lord {Hubert Royce} and Lady {Erna Royce}, née Waynwood  
—Younger sister of Bronze Yohn Royce

Lady {Bethany Bolton}, née Ryswell, 257 AC-291 AC  
—Second wife of Lord Roose, died of summer fever  
—Eldest daughter of Lord Rodrik Ryswell and Lady Wylma Ryswell, née Manderly

**Lady Wynne Bolton**, née Dustin, a skinchanger, greenseer, dragonrider, and mage, b. 280 AC  
—Lady of the Dreadfort, heir to Barrowton and Harrenhal, and Bride of Trees  
—Third wife of Lord Roose, pregnant with twins  
—Only daughter of Lord {Willam Dustin} and Lady Barbrey Dustin, née Ryswell

{Ramsay Snow}, 273 AC-297 AC  
—Bastard son of Lord Roose by a lowborn miller’s wife named {[Rue](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Miller%27s_wife)}  
—Was executed along with his mother after they attempted to poison his trueborn half-brother

**Domeric Bolton**, b. 277 AC  
—Heir to the Dreadfort  
—Only living son of Lord Roose by Lady Bethany

**Lady Sansa Stark**, a skinchanger and warg, b. 285 AC  
—Eldest daughter of the Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North  
—Ward of House Bolton  
—Betrothed to Domeric

{Robar Bolton} and {Reese Bolton}, 282 AC-282 AC  
—Twin sons of Lord Roose by Lady Bethany who died still in the cradle

{Broderick Bolton}, 285 AC-286 AC  
—Another son of Lord Roose by Lady Bethany who died still in the cradle

Lady {Rhonda Redfort}, née Bolton, 244 AC-277 AC  
—Lady of the Redfort  
—Second wife of Lord [Horton Redfort](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Horton_Redfort) and mother to Ser [Creighton Redfort](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Creighton_Redfort) and Ser [Jon Redfort](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Jon_Redfort)[f]  
—Eldest daughter of Lord {Robar Bolton} and Lady {Revna Bolton}, née Crowl

**Lady Roxanne Royce**, née Bolton, b. 249 AC  
—Lady of Runestone  
—Wife and cousin of Bronze Yohn Royce and mother to Ser [Andar Royce](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Ryella_Royce), Lady [Ryella Frey](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Ryella_Royce), née Royce, Ser [Robar Royce](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Robar_Royce), Ser {[Waymar Royce](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Waymar_Royce)}, and Lady [Ysilla Royce](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Ysilla_Royce)[g]  
—Second daughter of Lord {Robar Bolton} and Lady {Revna Bolton}, née Crowl

* * *

**☙ The Dreadfort ❧**

* * *

This castle is a fortress built to withstand enemies, and in ten thousand years the walls have never been breached. It consists of six parts: the outermost wall, the lower ward, the outer courtyard, the inner courtyard, the upper ward, and of course the castle keep.

**THE OUTERMOST WALL** is meant to repel enemies. It’s thick and festooned with defenses: machicolations through which stones or burning oil could be dropped on attackers, embrasures through which arrows can be shot, catapults and scorpions to launch projectiles, and merlons atop the battlements. It does not have towers because outermost towers would make obvious targets for siege engines. It’s always garrisoned by guardsmen and men-at-arms. There is one way out: through a thick weirwood gate reinforced by solid weatherproofed steel and fortified by a gatehouse. In the event of a siege, the lower ward behind the wall is fortified with caltrops.

**THE LOWER WARD** is the space between the outermost wall and the wall surrounding the outer courtyard. It consists of the godswood, smithy, barracks, mews, stables and kennels.

**THE OUTER COURTYARD** is enclosed by a wall augmented by massive towers, one at each corner. Its walls are fortified with the same defenses as the outermost wall, in the event the outermost wall is breached. Unlike the outermost wall, the wall surrounding the outer courtyard is not solid thick stone: they contain storerooms and corridors that connect each of the towers. Its towers are connected to the wall surrounding the inner courtyard by covered stone walkways. Here is where the castle guardsmen and men-at-arms train. Inside these four towers are:

THE CHANDLERY, where the wax and candles are made  
the rooms occupied by the head chandler, his family, candlemakers and waxworkers  
the storerooms full of candles and various things made of wax (i.e. sealing wax, finishes and coatings)

THE REFECTORY, where repairs are made or scheduled  
the rooms occupied by the master refector, his family and subordinates  
the storerooms full of tools used for repairs

THE FUELLERIES, where fuel is made  
the rooms occupied by the fuellers, charcoalburners and hetheleders  
the storerooms full of fuel (oil, wood, charcoal and heather)

**THE INNER COURTYARD** is enclosed by a third wall, one with towers at each corner. It consists of the castle well, beehives, glass gardens, and guesthouses. Unlike the other castle walls, they contain the quarters where the castle officers and servants live along with their families. It’s also where smokehouses are built in preparation for winter. Inside those four towers are:

THE SPENCERY, or the larder, where raw meat is larded and preserved and stored  
THE GRANARIES, where the grain and feed are stored above and underground  
THE CANNERY, where food is canned and stored

**THE CASTLE KEEP **has five towers and seven floors, with fortifications embedded in the walls in the event that all of the walls outside the castle are breached. It has many rooms that are used as extra storerooms during the winter or are opened in the event of royal guests. Over a hundred people work in the castle, though most of the servants live outside the keep. Inside the castle keep are:

THE LORD AND LADY’S CHAMBERS, consisting of:  
two adjoining bedchambers  
two solars for entertaining guests  
two offices  
two wardrobes  
a privy chamber or garderobe  
Roose’s giant pink marble bathtub, which has its own room  
assorted smaller bedchambers for ladies-in-waiting and servants  
storerooms

DOMERIC’S CHAMBERS, consisting of:  
a bedchamber  
a wardrobe  
a privy chamber or garderobe  
smaller bedchambers for servants

SANSA’S CHAMBERS, consisting of:  
a bedchamber  
a wardrobe  
a privy chamber or garderobe  
smaller bedchambers for ladies-in-waiting

THE LORD STEWARD’S CHAMBERS, consisting of:  
a tower in which Lord Steward, his wife and daughter, and their servants live

THE CASTELLAN’S CHAMBERS, consisting of:  
a tower in which the castellan, his wife and young children, his niece and nephew, and their servants live

UNOCCUPIED CHAMBERS, each consisting of:  
a bedchamber  
a wardrobe  
a privy chamber or garderobe  
smaller bedchambers for servants and chambermaids

THE ENTRANCE HALL, where guests are received  
THE GREAT HALL, where the court is held and meals are eaten  
THE BALLROOM, where formal balls are held  
THE ARMORY, where the castle arms and arsenal are stored  
THE ROOKERY, where the ravens live and messages are sent, above the rooms in which the maesters live  
THE APOTHECARY, where medicines are made and stored, below the room in which the midwife lives  
THE LIBRARY, where the books live and castle records are kept

THE KITCHENS AND LAUNDRY, consisting of:  
the kitchen, where the meals are cooked  
the pantry, where food and beverages are stored  
the buttery, where beer and wine and mead and ale are made and prepared for serving  
the cellar, where beer and wine and mead and ale are stored  
the bakehouse, where the bread and other baked goods are made  
the confectionery, where the honey and jam and jelly is made and stored  
the saucery, where sauces are made  
the spicery, where spices are made and stored  
the slaughterhouse, where raw meat is skinned and butchered and prepared for cooking  
the scaldinghouse, where the utensils and carcasses of animals are scalded  
the scullery, where dishes are washed, clothes are laundered, and water is boiled for cooking and bathing  
the ewery, where vessels for bathing and drinking water are cleaned and stored  
the napery, where linens are washed and stored

THE WARDROBE, consisting of:  
the weavery, where the cloth is woven from thread or yarn  
the sewery, where the cloth and sewing implements are stored and clothes are repaired  
the fullery, where the wool is spun into yarn or thread and knitted or woven into cloth that is then fulled and shrunk to make it thicker  
the cobblery, where the shoes are made and repaired

* * *

**☙ Household Officers ❧**

* * *

Lord Bertam Waterman, the steward  
Ser Erskine Holt, the castellan  
Maester Uthor, counselor, healer, and tutor  
Maester Tybald, counselor, healer, and tutor  
Mistress Betony, the midwife  
Lady Ellara Stout, the seneschal and lady-in-waiting to Lady Wynne  
Lady Kenna Holt, the Mistress of the Wardrobe and lady-in-waiting to Lady Wynne  
Lady Penthea Waterman, the Mistress of Keys and lady-in-waiting to Lady Wynne  
Ser Wayland Manderly, the master-at-arms  
Steelshanks Walton, the captain of the household guard  
Locke Snow, the master of the hunt, who presides over the huntsmen  
Ben Bones, the kennelmaster, who runs the kennels  
the master falconer, who runs the mews  
the stablemaster, who runs the stables  
the head beekeeper, who presides over the beehives  
the master armorer, who forges and reforges weapons and armor  
the master blacksmith, who forges and reforges other metalwork  
the head chamberlain, who presides over the chambermaids  
the mistress weaver, who makes fabric and cloth  
the mistress tailor, who makes, alters, and repairs clothing  
the master cobbler, who makes and repairs shoes  
the head laundress, who presides over laundry  
the naperer, who runs the napery  
the ewerer, who runs the ewery  
the head cook, who runs the kitches  
the pantler, who presides over the pantry  
the butcher, who runs the slaughterhouse  
the baker, who presides over bread and other baked goods  
the butterer, who runs the buttery and brewery  
the poulter, who procures the poultry  
the confectioner, who presides over jellies and jams  
the saucerer, who runs the saucery  
the spicerer, who runs the spicery  
the scalder, who runs the scaldinghouse  
the spencer, who runs the spencery  
the scullerer, who runs the scullery  
the head granarer, who presides over the granaries  
the head cellarer, who presides over the cellars  
the master fueller, who presides over the fuellery  
the master chandler, who makes the wax and candles  
the master refector, who makes and schedules repairs  
the head gardener, who presides over the gardens

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [f] Horton Redfort, first mentioned in _ASoS_, Tyrion III and whose family was first mentioned in the appendix of _AFfC_, has been married thrice and widowed twice. GRRM hasn’t specified which of his wives bore which of his sons.
> 
> [g] Yohn Royce has unnamed daughters besides Ysilla and grandaughters mentioned in _AFfC_, Alayne II. Ryella Frey, née Royce, is first mentioned in the appendix of _ACoK_, and while her relationship to House Royce is canonically unknown, she has two sons and two daughters. One of whom is also named Ryella Frey.


	21. Appendix C

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
Appendix C: House Dustin, c. 297 AC

* * *

**☙ House Dustin of Barrowton ❧**

* * *

House Dustin stems from the ancient line of Garth Greenhand through his eldest daughter, Gwynn the Huntress, twin sister of Garth the Gardener, who inherited the epithet of the Green from her father, and from the Storm God through his demigod son, Thorr, who took the surname Dustin from the stone upon which he was found by the Children of the Forest after his mother died in childbed. Thorr was raised by the Children of the Forest, and with Gwynn he built the wooden city of Barrowton atop the grave of her father, the High King of the First Men. House Dustin rules from their ancestral seat of Barrow Hall in the center of the wooden city. Their house sigil is a pair crossed battle axes beneath a rusted crown on a gold field. Their house words are _Axes Forget What Trees Remember_. Their unofficial family motto is _where the offense is, let the axe fall_.

In the days before the coming of the Andals, they ruled as Barrow Kings of the Barrowlands and warred against the Kings of Winter for thousands of years. This culminated in the Thousand Years War fought a thousand years after the Andal invasion, which ended after the last of the Barrow Kings bent the knee to House Stark and King Eyron Stark took his daughter, Princess Helewys Dustin, as his wife.

After the Conquest, Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters held court twice in Barrowton. Denys Snow, the Bastard of Barrowton, joined Aegon the Uncrowned and they fought against Maegor the Cruel before they perished in the Battle Beneath the Gods Eye. When Jaehaerys the Conciliator and Good Queen Alysanne visited Barrowton on their royal progress in 58 AC, Lord Thorren Dustin honored them by hosting a small tourney and Good Queen Alysanne held one of her women’s courts in the wooden city.

House Dustin supported Princess Rhaenys Targaryen, the Queen Who Never Was, in the Great Council of 101 AC held at Harrenhal. Jaehaerys the Conciliator had chosen Prince Baelon, his second son, over Rhaenys after the death of his eldest son and heir, Prince Aemon, in 92 AC. This caused the Second Quarrel between the king and queen. Baelon perished in 101 AC, and fourteen claimants were considered before they chose Prince Viserys Targaryen, who later reigned as Viserys I.

Lord Roderick Dustin, known as Roddy the Ruin, led a host of two thousand northern warriors known as the Winter Wolves and fought in the Dance of the Dragons for Rhaenyra I Targaryen, the Half-Year Queen, on the side of the blacks. Roddy the Ruin defeated the greens in the Battle by the Lakeshore and in the Butcher’s Ball, where he led the charge that claimed the life of the Kingmaker, Ser Criston Cole, before he died in the First Battle of Tumbleton in 130 AC, succumbing to his wounds only after he cut down Ser Bryndon Hightower and Lord Ormund Hightower. Lord Bennifer Dustin closed the city gates of Barrowton to hundreds of smallfolk in order to prevent the spread of the winter fever that struck the North in 134 AC. Mass starvation ensued.

House Dustin again fought for House Targaryen in the War of the Ninepenny Kings, also known as the Fifth Blackfyre Rebellion, in 260 AC. Lord Royce Dustin fostered Brandon Stark, the heir to Winterfell, from 268 AC until his death in the winter fever epidemic of 272 AC. Brandon remained in fosterage at Barrow Hall until he came of age in 276 AC.

After the Warden of the North and Brandon Stark were tortured and murdered by Mad King Aerys, Lord Eddard Stark called his banners and young Lord Willam Dustin led the Barrowton levies. Willam died at the Tower of Joy, slain by Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning. Ned Stark buried him in a cairn beneath the Red Mountains of Dorne. Lady Barbrey Dustin, his widow, now rules as the Lady of Barrowton. Domeric Bolton, her nephew and heir to the Dreadfort, served as her page between 284 AC and 288 AC.

In the aftermath of Robert’s Rebellion, the male line of House Dustin has been extinguished. Lady Wynne Dustin, the only daughter of Lord Willam by Lady Barbrey, is the last of her line. However, the power bloc formed by House Dustin, House Ryswell, and House Manderly over the last three generations has put all of northern interkingdom and international trade under the control of a single extended family.

* * *

**☙ Historical Dustins ❧**

* * *

**Gwynn Dustin**, known as Gwynn the Huntress or Gwynn the Green, eldest daughter of [Garth Greenhand](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Garth_Greenhand) and founder of House Dustin (c. ~12,000 BC)

**Thorr Dustin**, husband of Gwynn the Huntress, son of the [Storm God](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Storm_God) (c. ~12,000 BC)

**Queen Helewys Stark**, née Dustin, Queen in the North and wife of King [Eyron Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Eyron_Stark) (c. ~2,000 BC)

[**Denys Snow**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Denys_Snow), the Bastard of Barrowton who fought in the [Battle Beneath the Gods Eye](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Battle_Beneath_the_Gods_Eye) (c. 43 AC)

**Lord **[**Roderick Dustin**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Roderick_Dustin), known as Roddy the Ruin, a Lord of Barrowton and Warden of the Saltspear who led the [Winter Wolves](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Winter_Wolves) during the Dance of the Dragons (c. 129 AC-131 AC)

**Lady Ryanne Dustin**, née Ryswell, a Lady of Barrowton, wife of Roddy the Ruin

**Lord Bennifer Dustin**, a Lord of Barrowton and Warden of the Saltspear, son of Roddy the Ruin and Lady Ryanne

**Lady **[**Barba Dustin**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Barba_Bolton), née Bolton, a Lady of Barrowton, wife of Lord Bennifer, a maiden at the Maiden’s Day Cattle Show (c. 133 AC)

**Lord Bedivere Dustin**, a Lord of Barrowton and Warden of the Saltspear, son of Lord Bennifer and Lady Barba

**Lady **[**Alys Dustin**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Alys_Stark), née Stark, a Lady of Barrowton, wife of Lord Bedivere, second daughter of Lord [Cregan Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Cregan_Stark) and Lady [Alysanne Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Alysanne_Blackwood), née Blackwood

**Lord Cregard Dustin**, a Lord of Barrowton and Warden of the Saltspear, son of Lord Bedivere and Lady Alys

**Lady Helaine Dustin**, née Hightower, a Lady of Barrowton, wife of Lord Cregard, sixth and youngest daughter of Ser [Garmund Hightower](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Garmund_Hightower) and Princess [Rhaena Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Rhaena_Targaryen_\(daughter_of_Daemon\))

**Lord Bennard Dustin**, a Lord of Barrowton and Warden of the Saltspear, son of Lord Cregard and Lady Helaine

**Lady **[**Jeyne Dustin**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Jeyne_Waters), née Waters, a Lady of Barrowton, wife of Lord Bennard, bastard daughter of Lord Alyn Velaryon and Princess Elaena Targaryen

**Lord Alyn Dustin**, a Lord of Barrowton and Warden of the Saltspear, eldest son of Lord Bennard and Lady Jeyne

**Lady **[**Alysanne Dustin**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Alysanne_Stark), née Stark, a Lady of Barrowton, wife of Lord Alyn, second daughter of Lord [Beron Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Beron_Stark) and Lady [Lorra Stark](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Lorra_Royce), née Royce

**Ser Warren Dustin**, a knight who fought in the War of the Ninepenny Kings, second son of Lord Bennard and Lady Jeyne

**Lady Eanna Locke**, née Dustin, Lady of Oldcastle, wife of Lord Sylvester Locke, only daughter of Lord Bennard and Lady Jeyne

**Lord Royce Dustin**, a Lord of Barrowton and Warden of the Saltspear, eldest son of Lord Alyn and Lady Alysanne, fostered Brandon Stark c. 268 AC-272 AC

**Lady Robyn Manderly**, née Dustin, wife of Lord Wyman Manderly and Lady of White Harbor, only daughter of Lord Alyn and Lady Alysanne (d. 291 AC)

**Ser Bennifer Dustin**, a knight who fought in Robert’s Rebellion renowned for his prowess with an axe, third son of Lord Alyn and Lady Alysanne (d. 281 AC)

* * *

**☙ House Dustin, c. 297 AC ❧**

* * *

**Lady Barbrey Dustin**, née Ryswell, b. 261 AC  
—Head of House Dustin  
—Lady of Barrowton and Wardeness of the Saltspear  
—Widow of Lord {Willam Dustin}  
—Second daughter of Lord Rodrik Ryswell and Lady Wylma Manderly, née Ryswell  
—Namesake of her grandmother Lady {Barba Ryswell}, née Slate

Lord {Willam Dustin}, 260 AC-281 AC  
—Lord of Barrowton and Warden of the Saltspear, died at the Tower of Joy  
—Only son of Lord {Royce Dustin} and Lady Agnes Dustin, née Blackwood

**Lady Agnes Dustin**, née Blackwood, a skinchanger, b. 242 AC  
—Formerly the Lady of Barrowton  
—Ruled as regent for her son after her husband died until he came of age in 276 AC  
—Eldest daughter of Lord {Brynden Blackwood} and Lady [Celia Blackwood](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Celia_Tully), née Tully  
—Twin sister to Lord [Tytos Blackwood](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Tytos_Blackwood)  
—Namesake of her forebearer Lady {[Agnes Blackwood](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Agnes_Blackwood)}

**Lady Wynne Bolton**, née Dustin, a skinchanger, greenseer, dragonrider, and mage, b. 280 AC  
—Lady of the Dreadfort, heir to Barrowton and Harrenhal, and Bride of Trees  
—Third wife of Lord Roose Bolton, pregnant with twins  
—Only daughter of Lord {Willam Dustin} and Lady Barbrey Dustin, née Ryswell

Ser {Addam Dustin}, 266 AC-295 AC  
—Only son of Ser {Bennifer Dustin}  
—Slain by the outlaw {[Aegon Bloodborn](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Aegon_Frey_\(son_of_Aenys\))}  
—Formerly betrothed to Lady Wynne

[**Archmaester Willifer**](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Willifer), known as the Polemologist  
—Second son of Lord {Alyn Dustin} and Lady {Alysanne Dustin}, née Stark  
—Archmaester of the Citadel who specializes in polemology, the study of human conflict and warcraft  
—Contemporary and friend of Maester Aemon

* * *

**☙ Barrowton ❧**

* * *

Barrowton is one of three significantly large settlements in the North, as well as the epicenter of both local and inter-kingdom trade. Its population is approximately 25,000, but that number swells during markets and festivals to 100,000 or more. Barrow Hall, the ancestral seat of House Dustin, is located atop the Great Barrow, where the High King of the First Men or a king of the giants is purportedly buried.

There is a road between the Barrowlands and White Harbor known as the Whiteroad that intersects with the Kingsroad, serving as the main conveyance for trading wagons and caravans. Barrowton holds markets twice a year and hosts several festivals every year, including the Festival of Flowers during the week in which Bealtainn falls. Each street is lined with a different sort of tree, for which the streets are named. Their territory extends from the western banks of the White Knife on the coast of the Bite to the banks of Rillwater Burn, bordering the demense of House Manderly to the east, House Ryswell to the west, House Cerwyn and House Tallhart to the north, and House Flint of Flint’s Finger to the south across the Saltspear.

Barrowton is located at the confluence of the Burn of Barrow, a river that flows into the Saltspear, and a tributary called the Yarrow Water. These rivers are filled with salmon, trout, sticklebacks, torgoch, steelhead, paperbelly, cod, squaretail, greyling, whitefish and stone loaches, as well as pearl mussels and crayfish. Most of the smallfolk in the Barrowlands are farmers, herders, millers, fishermen or fullers.

House Dustin has only two vassals: House Ashwood of the Ashwood, named for a forest that has dwindled into plains as lumber and timber were harvested over the years, and House Stout of Goldgrass, whose keep is located near the eastern gate of the city. Lord Ackerly Ashwood rules a holdfast on the border of the Barrowlands and the swamps of the Neck, near the mouth of the Fever River. Lord Harwood Stout attends court at Barrow Hall.

Barrowton has prospered under the rulership of House Dustin, making them one of the wealthiest families in the North, second only to House Manderly. Although the town has no port, they do have a modest fleet of two dozen war galleys to guard against ironborn raiders or pirates from the Sunset Sea.

* * *

**☙ Household Officers ❧**

* * *

Lady Alameda Ashwood, the seneschal  
Lady Eiralys Stout, the castellan  
Maester Ellyndor, counselor, healer, and tutor  
Mistress Salvia, the midwife  
the master-at-arms  
the captain of the household guard  
the mistress of the hunt, who presides over the huntsmen  
the kennelmaster, who runs the kennels  
the mistress falconer, who runs the mews  
the stablemaster, who runs the stables  
the head beekeeper, who presides over the beehives  
the master armorer, who forges and reforges weapons and armor  
the master blacksmith, who forges and reforges other metalwork  
the head chamberlain, who presides over the chambermaids  
the mistress weaver, who makes fabric and cloth  
the mistress tailor, who makes, alters, and repairs clothing  
the master cobbler, who makes and repairs shoes  
the head laundress, who presides over laundry  
the naperer, who runs the napery  
the ewerer, who runs the ewery  
the head cook, who runs the kitches  
the pantler, who presides over the pantry  
the butcher, who runs the slaughterhouse  
the baker, who presides over bread and other baked goods  
the butterer, who runs the buttery and brewery  
the poulter, who procures the poultry  
the confectioner, who presides over jellies and jams  
the saucerer, who runs the saucery  
the spicerer, who runs the spicery  
the scalder, who runs the scaldinghouse  
the spencer, who runs the spencery  
the scullerer, who runs the scullery  
the head granarer, who presides over the granaries  
the head cellarer, who presides over the cellars  
the mistress fueller, who presides over the fuellery  
the mistress chandler, who makes the wax and candles  
the mistress refector, who makes and schedules repairs  
the head gardener, who presides over the gardens


	22. Appendix D

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
Appendix D: Dragons Eggs & Dragonriders

* * *

**☙ Known Unhatched Dragon Eggs in the Seven Kingdoms ❧**

* * *

  * Three eggs clutched by [Dreamfyre](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Dreamfyre) on Dragonstone, stolen from Princess [Rhaena Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Rhaena_Targaryen_\(daughter_of_Aenys_I\)) by Lady [Elissa Farman](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Elissa_Farman) in 54 AC and sold to the Sealord of Braavos.
  * One presented to [Mysaria](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Mysaria), the pregnant concubine of Prince [Daemon Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Daemon_Targaryen), in 105 AC before his father Viserys I commanded him to return the egg and send her away.
  * One belonging to [Viserys II Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Viserys_II_Targaryen), possibly the same egg that was presented to Mysaria.
  * Unknown number clutched by Vermax in the crypts beneath Winterfell during the Dance of the Dragons in 129 AC, although the existence of this clutch is disputed.
  * Three belonging to Lady [Rhaena Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Rhaena_Targaryen_\(daughter_of_Daemon\)), the daughter of Prince Daemon and Lady [Laena Velaryon](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Laena_Velaryon), one of which hatched into [Morning](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Morning) in the Vale during the Dance of the Dragons in 129 AC.
  * One belonging to the young Prince [Maelor Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Maelor_Targaryen), who died at Bitterbridge during the Dance of the Dragons in 130 AC. It was sent to Longtable by [Lady Caswell](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Lady_Caswell) and returned to House Targaryen by House Hightower.
  * Five clutched by the [last dragon](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Last_dragon), laid sometime before her death in 153 AC.
  * One placed in the cradle of Princess [Elaena Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Elaena_Targaryen) in 150 AC; silver and gold.
  * One placed in the cradle of Prince [Daeron Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Daeron_Targaryen_\(son_of_Maekar_I\)), known as Daeron the Drunken, in 190 AC.
  * One placed in the cradle of Prince [Aerion Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Aerion_Targaryen), known as Aerion Brightflame, in between 191 AC and 194 AC.
  * One placed in the cradle of Prince Aemon Targaryen, known as Maester Aemon, in 198 AC.
  * One placed in the cradle of [Aegon V Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Aegon_V_Targaryen), known as Aegon the Unlikely, in 200 AC; white, with green swirls.
  * Seven that the pyromancers attempted to hatch at Summerhall in 259 AC. Two of these were ostensibly the dragon eggs belonging to Aegon V and Maester Aemon, while the other five eggs were possibly the clutch laid by the last dragon.
  * One given to the grandfather Lord [Ambrose Butterwell](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Ambrose_Butterwell) by Aegon the Unworthy and repossessed by Bloodraven in 212 AC; red, with gold flecks and black whorls.
  * Other possible clutches: [Sheepstealer](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Sheepstealer) in the Mountains of the Moon, [Silverwing](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Silverwing) on the island north of [Red Lake](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Red_Lake) where she made her lair after the Dance of the Dragons or possibly at the Wall (_AFfC_, Samwell I).

* * *

**☙ Potential Dragonriders ❧**

* * *

  * **Jon Snow**, son of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen and Lady Lyanna Stark
  * **Aly Snow**, daughter of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen and Lady Lyanna Stark
  * **Princess Rhaenys Targaryen**, daughter of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen and Princess Elia Martell
  * **Prince Aegon Targaryen**, son of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen and Princess Elia Martell
  * **Prince Doran Martell**, a descendant of Prince [Maron Martell](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Maron_Martell) and Princess [Daenerys Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Daenerys_Targaryen_\(daughter_of_Aegon_IV\)), unlikely because of his gout
  * **Prince Oberyn Martell**, a descendant of Prince Maron Martell and Princess Daenerys Targaryen
  * **Princess Arianne Martell**, daughter of Prince Doran and Lady Mellario of Norvos
  * **Prince Quentyn Martell**, son of Prince Doran and Lady Mellario of Norvos
  * **Prince Trystane Martell**, son of Prince Doran and Lady Mellario of Norvos
  * **Obara Sand**, daughter of Prince Oberyn and an Oldtown whore
  * **Nymeria Sand**, daughter of Prince Oberyn and a Volantene noblewoman
  * **Tyene Sand**, daughter of Prince Oberyn and a septa
  * **Sarella Sand**, daughter of Prince Oberyn and a captain from the Summer Isles
  * **Elia Sand**, daughter of Prince Oberyn and Ellaria Sand
  * **Obella Sand**, daughter of Prince Oberyn and Ellaria Sand
  * **Dorea Sand**, daughter of Prince Oberyn and Ellaria Sand
  * **Loreza Sand**, daughter of Prince Oberyn and Ellaria Sand
  * **Lord Edric Dayne**, the young Lord of Starfall
  * **Lady Allyria Dayne**, the acting Lady of Starfall, currently ruling as regent
  * **Ser Gerold Dayne**, the Knight of High Hermitage, called Darkstar
  * **Lady Betha Blackwood**, Queen Dowager, daughter of Lord Brynden Blackwood and Lady Mya Rivers, widow of Aegon V Targaryen
  * **Princess Rhaelle Targaryen**, Queen Grandmother and Dowager of Storm’s End, daughter of Aegon V Targaryen and Betha Blackwood
  * **King Robert I Baratheon**, a descendant of Lord [Ormund Baratheon](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Ormund_Baratheon) and Princess [Rhaelle Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Rhaelle_Targaryen)
  * **Mya Stone**, bastard daughter of King Robert by a lowborn woman from the Eyrie in the Vale
  * **Bella Rivers**, bastard daughter of King Robert by a whore at the Peach in Stoney Sept
  * **Edric Storm**, bastard son of King Robert by Lady [Delena Florent](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Delena_Florent)
  * **Gendry Waters**, bastard son of King Robert by a lowborn woman from King’s Landing named Aralia
  * **Lord Stannis Baratheon**, a descendant of Lord Ormund Baratheon and Princess Rhaelle Targaryen
  * **Lady Shireen Baratheon**, daughter of Lord Stannis and Lady Selyse Florent
  * **Lord Renly Baratheon**, a descendant of Lord Ormund Baratheon and Princess Rhaelle Targaryen
  * **Lady Mayseline Tyrell**, a descendant of Princess [Rhae Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Rhae_Targaryen) and Princess [Daella Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Daella_Targaryen_\(daughter_of_Maekar_I\))
  * **Ser Vaegon Flowers**, a descendant of Princess Rhae Targaryen and Princess Daella Targaryen
  * **Ser Vesper Flowers**, a descendant of Princess Rhae Targaryen and Princess Daella Targaryen
  * ETA: **Brienne Tarth**, a descendant of Princess [Vaella Targaryen](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Vaella_Targaryen_\(daughter_of_Daeron\))

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mayseline is one of the many textual ghosts of _ASoIaF_ as both one of the four unnamed sisters of [Lorent Caswell](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Lorent_Caswell) mentioned in _ADwD_, Tyrion III and as one of the unknown descendants of Princess Daella and Princess Rhae, both of whom canonically married and had issue according to Maester Aemon in _AFfC_, Samwell IV. Ser Vaegon and Ser Vesper are her cousins and textual ghosts as well, since we know almost nothing about the members of House Vyrwel, except that Ser [Igon Vyrwel](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Igon_Vyrwel) is the captain of the household guard at Highgarden.


	23. Appendix E

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
Appendix E: Months & Holidays

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m approximately ~52,000 words into writing Book 2 and I’m only midway through the second arc of the eight I have outlined. It’s going to be an epic length monstrosity. YE OLDE YIKES.
> 
> All monthly names were derived from Native American names for each month, so they’re not something I made up. This is by no means a comprehensive list of festivals and holidays, either. It’s only holidays celebrated in the North in this AU with notes on the ones that were appropriated by the Faith in the aftermath of the Andal invasion. I imagine all of the other regions of the Seven Kingdoms have their own holidays in addition to the ones listed here.
> 
> I chose not to include many Ancient Greek holidays since the world of _ASoIaF_ doesn’t have any religions with the huge pantheons that most real world mythologies do and many of the Ancient Greek holidays were dedicated to specific deities. Chalkeia was celebrated in honor of both Athena and Hephaestus, in fact. Ancient Roman festivals were often dedicated to specific deities as well, but they were much easier to rework. I chose not to include the feast days of saints for a similar reason: because saints aren’t a thing in the world GRRM wrote. Which is why I don’t like to write the Faith of the Seven as expy Catholicism without thinking critically about it, because many components of actual Catholicism and of the other Abrahamic religions (e.g. Judaism and Islam) just do not exist in the world of _ASoIaF_. Also, because the Stranger is rarely worshipped or prayed to canonically, that aspect of the Seven has no holy day.

* * *

**☙ Months ❧**

* * *

**January**: Wolf Moon  
**February**: Hunger Moon  
**March**: Crow Moon  
**April**: Pink Moon  
**May**: Flower Moon  
**June**: Hot Moon  
**July**: Buck Moon  
**August**: Grain Moon  
**September**: Corn Moon  
**October**: Blood Moon  
**November**: Oak Moon  
**December**: Cold Moon

* * *

**☙ Northern Holidays ❧**

* * *

**Wolf Moon (January) 24**: feast day celebrating the sowing of grain fields (based on the Roman festival of Feriae Sementivae).

**Wolf Moon (January) 31**: holiday celebrating new beginnings held in honor of the gods (based on the Norse holiday Dísablót).

**Hunger Moon (February) 1**: feast day celebrating the beginning of the growing season (based on the pagan holiday of Imbolc).

**Hunger Moon (February) 13-15**: holiday celebrating health and fertility (based on the pre-Roman holiday of Lupercalia).

**Crow Moon (March) 1**: holiday celebrating women, motherhood, and childbirth (based on the Roman festival of Matronales Feriae). This has been appropriated by the Faith of the Seven as the Feast Day of Our Mother Above.

**Crow Moon (March) 20-22**: feast celebrating the northward equinox.

**Pink Moon (April) 15**: feast day celebrating good fortune on journeys and victory in war (based on the Norse holiday Sigrblót). This has been appropriated by the Faith of the Seven as the Warrior’s Day.

**Flower Moon (May) 1**: Bealtainn, a festival celebrating flowers, vegetation, growth, and maidenhood (based on the pagan holiday of Beltane). This has been appropriated by the Faith of the Seven as the [Maiden’s Day](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Maiden%27s_Day). FUN FACT: It’s also Wynne’s nameday.

**Flower Moon (May) 29**: feast day celebrating agriculture (based on the Roman festival of Ambarvalia).

**Hot Moon (June) 5**: feast day celebrating oaths (based on the Roman festival of Dius Fidius). This has been appropriated by the Faith of the Seven as the [Feast Day of Our Father Above](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Feast_Day_of_Our_Father_Above).

**Hot Moon (June) 20-22**: feast days celebrating the solstice that falls on the longest days of the year.

**Buck Moon (July) 5**: feast day celebrating the arrival of the First Men in Westeros (based on the Roman holiday Poplifugia).

**Buck Moon (July) 14-19**: market day fairs held in Barrowton (based on the Roman Mercatus Apollinares).

**Buck Moon (July) 19-21**: festival of the grove (based on the Roman holiday Lucaria).

**Grain Moon (August) 1**: holiday celebrating the grain harvest (based on the pagan holiday of Lughnasadh).

**Grain Moon (August) 28**: festival of the sun and moon.

**Corn Moon (September) 20-22**: feast celebrating the southward equinox.

**Blood Moon (October) 31**: Samhuinn, a festival held in honor of the land celebrating fruitfulness, wisdom, and death (based on the Norse holiday Vetrablót or the Celtic holiday of Samhain). This has been appropriated by the Faith of the Seven as the Crone’s Day.

**Oak Moon (November) 18-20**: market day fairs held in Barrowton (based on the Roman Mercatus Plebeii).

**Oak Moon (November) 30**: festival celebrating metalworkers and handicrafts (based on the Ancient Greek holiday Chalkeia). This has been appropriated by the Faith of the Seven as the [Smith’s Day](https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Smith%27s_Day).

**Cold Moon (December) 20-22**: feast days celebrating the solstice that falls on the longest nights of the year.

**Cold Moon (December) 31**: holiday celebrating the end of the old year and the beginning of the new (based on Hogmanay, the Scottish New Year).


	24. Glossary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
Glossary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I posted Appendix E last Friday and later that night, my sister’s husband of seventeen years shot himself in the head. We’re still reeling, and grieving. As someone who attempted suicide in the past I have a lot of complicated feelings, but it pisses me off that he survived being infected with COVID-19 only to take his own life. Please be safe out there, and call a crisis hotline if you’re suicidal and you feel you can’t talk to the people you love. I promise that suicide is never the only way out—I’m living proof.
> 
> This is the last of the bonus content for Book 1, so the next update will be the prologue of Book 2.

**Acre**: 22 by 220 yards of land, approximately 4,840 square yards. Unlike the modern acre, these were typically rectangular.

**Affeer**: an assessment to settle the amount paid for an amercement.

**Agnatic primogeniture**: the right by which a firstborn son inherits lands, titles, and property from their father. Dorne practices absolute primogeniture, the right by which a firstborn child inherits regardless of gender.

**Agnatic succession**: patrilineal line of succession that restricts inheritance of a throne or fief to heirs descended from the original holder through male descendants only.

**Allodial**: ownership of property (i.e. land, buildings and fixtures) that is not contingent upon fealty to a king or a liege.

**Amercement**: fines paid to a lord by a person found guilty of some trespass in exchange for mercy.

**Amobyr**: a fee paid to a lord on the marriage of a lowborn woman. Also called formariage, merchet or marchet.

**Appanage**: the grant of an estate, title, office or property of value to a younger child of a sovereign, who would otherwise have no inheritance under the system of primogeniture (e.g. younger sons, daughters).

**Appurtenance**: a right that comes with a property (e.g. if your holding includes a forest, you have the right to cut down trees for wood and hunt the game therein).

**Armory**: a room where the castle arms and arsenal are stored.

**Arpent**: a measurement of land approximately equivalent to a modern acre.

**Arrow loop**: a narrow vertical slit cut into a wall through which arrows could be fired.

**Assart**: a piece of forest or waste converted into arable land through deforestation. It was a crime to do so without a license.

**Assize**: a meeting of vassals with their king or liege. Also refers to decrees issued after the meeting.

**Attinctura**: corruption of the blood. When someone was condemned for committing a crime punishable by death, they also lost the right not only to hold their own lands and titles but also to pass them down to their descendants.

**Avera**: carrying items by horse or plowing fields in exchange for coin.

**Bailey**: a courtyard within an external wall or two outer walls.

**Balk**: a strip of unploughed land meant to mark a boundary line in between plots of ploughed land.

**Banality**: a fee imposed upon peasants by a feudal lord for the use of his property, typically paid in trade (e.g. a portion of the catch from a river or lake or shore, a portion of the game hunted in a warren).

**Barbican**: the gateway or outworks defending the drawbridge.

**Barrow**: an earthen burial mound. Also called a cairn.

**Bastion**: a small tower at the end of a curtain wall or in the middle of the outside wall.

**Batter**: a sloping part of a curtain wall; the sharp angle at the base of all walls and towers along their exterior surface.

**Battlement**: a narrow wall built along the outer edge of the wallwalk to protect the soldiers against attack. Also called a crenelation.

**Belfry**: a type of siege engine, tall, often armored wooden tower which could be moved up against the wall of a castle or town to shield attackers. Also called a siege tower.

**Benefice**: a grant made by a lord, typically of land.

**Berm**: a flat space between the base of the curtain wall and the inner edge of the moat.

**Blunket**: light grey-blue woolen cloth.

**Boltinghouse**: a mill where bran is sifted or bolted from refined flour.

**Braies**: medieval undergarments for men.

**Buffet**: traditional dubbing administered to a knight.

**Burgage**: a town owned by a king or a lord where rent is paid in either service or coin.

**Bushel**: a dry measure equivalent to eight gallons or four pecks.

**Buttery**: a storeroom for beer and wine.

**Buttress**: a projection from a wall to give additional support.

**Cablish**: wood cut from windfallen trees or fallen branches.

**Caltrops**: small devices scattered on the ground to injure or lame passing horses with metal spikes.

**Capitation**: a tax levied on every liable adult regardless of income or resources. Also called a head tax or poll tax.

**Capon**: a rooster that has been castrated and fattened by force-feeding, described by Shakespeare as the food of the wealthy in his comedy _As You Like It_ (Act II, Scene VII).

**Carucage**: land tax based on the size of the demense. This replaced the danegeld, a tax paid to stop Vikings from raiding. It was replaced by income and property taxes.

**Castellan**: governor of a castle.

**Castle-guard**: a form of tenure in which knights or men-at-arms are paid to guard a castle for their lord.

**Cesspit**: an opening in a wall in which the waste from garderobes or privy chambers was collected.

**Chamberlain**: a household official in charge of a lord’s chambers.

**Chandlery**: a room where the wax and candles are made.

**Changeant**: fabric made of silk woven from two or more colors of warp and weft yarns to create an iridescent sheen.

**Cheminage**: a fee charged to pass through a royal forest.

**Chert**: a type of hard flint used to construct buildings and fortifications.

**Chevage**: annual capitation levied upon crofters or immigrant workers.

**Cob**: mud strengthened with straw or horsehair used as building materials.

**Cobblery**: a room where the shoes are made and repaired.

**Commutation**: converting the value of labor into monetary compensation.

**Copyhold**: a contract of sorts detailing the rights and privileges of each person or copyholder in the demense of a lord granted in exchange for their fealty and service. Stewards kept lists of these in records called the court roll.

**Corbel**: a projecting block of stone built into a wall during construction.

**Courser**: the swiftest type of warhorse, often used for hunting.

**Courtleet**: court held periodically in a lordship at which the lord or steward addressed petty offenses and civil affairs.

**Crannog**: a dwelling on a natural or manmade island.

**Croft**: tracts of enclosed land facing towards a village or township containing farmland and less arable land set aside for grazing livestock.

**Crofter**: a tenant subject to a lord to whom they paid services or dues in exchange for land. Also called villeins or cottars (in contrast with cottagers, peasants who lived in a cottage but held no land).

**Cupola**: a domed roof or ceiling, sometimes used as a protective cover for a scorpion.

**Curtesy**: the right of a widower to seize the lands of his deceased wife, if they had issue.

**Curtilage**: an enclosed courtyard attached to a dwelling.

**Demense**: territory containing a castle and land cultivated for a lord by a vassal, not held by freemen or crofters.

**Destrier**: the strongest and finest type of warhorse.

**Dooms**: formal judgments or legal decisions made in the court of a lord.

**Draft horse**: a heavy workhorse meant for plowing or pulling a cart rather than riding. Also called a carthorse, draught horse or dray horse.

**Drawbridge**: a heavy timber platform built to span a moat between a gatehouse and surrounding lands that could be raised when required to block an entrance.

**Droit de gite**: the right of lodging, the duty encumbent on a landholder to host the king and courtiers while on a royal progress.

**Droit de garenne**: the right of the hunt or right of warren, the right to hunt and fish on certain lands and to kill certain species of animal.

**Droit du seigneur**: the right of a lord to rape peasant brides on their wedding night before their husband consummates the marriage, which can be avoided by paying a fee. Also called _jus primae noctis_. Medieval scholars and historians believe this right is a myth, as every reference to the practice is from a later period.

**Dungeon**: a jail typically found in a tower.

**Embrasure**: a low segment of the altering high and low segments of a battlement.

**Enfeoffment**: deed of land granted in exchange for a pledge of fealty or service.

**Escheat**: the right of a lord to reclaim the lands held by a vassal or a peasant if the vassal or peasant dies without a lawful heir.

**Essoin**: an excuse for nonappearance in court during litigation.

**Essoineur**: the person who announces the excuse on behalf of the person who failed to appear.

**Estover**: the right to gather wood.

**Ewery**: a room where vessels for bathing and drinking water are cleaned and stored.

**Extents**: formal recitation and valuation of a fiefdom, including the services, rents, profits, etc. thereof.

**Eyre**: the right of a king or liege to visit and inspect the land of any vassal.

**Fair**: markets held either once or twice a year which offered a wide range of goods and where new laborers were hired.

**Fealty**: an oath sworn by a person of lower status to a person whose status is higher (e.g. a vassal to a lord, a lord to a king, a knight to a lord or queen or king).

**Felony**: originally a violation of a contract between a lord and a vassal, later expanded to include any crime against the king’s peace.

**Ferling**: a tract of land equal to a sixteenth of a hide, approximately 7-8 acres. Also called a ferthing.

**Feudal aids**: physical or financial aids required of a peasant or vassal to their lord on certain occasions, including the knighting of a son or marriage of a daughter. These aids could also be paid to vassals or towns.

**Feudal maintenance**: payment to soldiers who fought at the command of their lord.

**Fiefdom**: heritable property or rights granted by a king or lord to a vassal who held the land in fealty in exchange for allegiance. Also called a holding.

**Fiefrente**: a fee paid by a lord to a vassal in return for their fealty or military service, either in the form of coin or other trade goods (e.g. food, livestock, wine or wood).

**Finial**: a slender piece of stone used to decorate the tops of merlons.

**Firebote**: wood granted to a tenant by a lord to burn for fuel.

**Forebuilding**: an additional building against a keep containing the stair to the doorway.

**Forfeiture**: the right of a lord to reclaim the holding of a vassal if they violate the terms of their tenure.

**Fosse**: a ditch or moat.

**Fother**: a measure equivalent to 30 fotmal, 40 bushels, or 320 gallons.

**Fotmal**: a measure equivalent to 70 pounds or 5 stone, used to describe lead sheeting. Also called a votmel.

**Frankalmoin**: the right of those who belong to religious sects to accept coin or alms.

**Freehold**: land or property granted to a person in perpetuity and inherited by their descendants upon their demise.

**Freeholder**: a person who owns a freehold or fiefdom.

**Freeman**: free tenant farmers unbonded to the land; these peasants were entitled by either birth, privileged admission, or admission by payment to enter a guild of a town and freely practice a craft or sell wares in town. Unlike crofters, freemen were not bound to the land but instead paid rent fees in exchange for residence and were not subject to marriage fees.

**Fuellery**: a room where fuel is made and stored.

**Fullery**: a room where the wool is spun into yarn or thread and knitted or woven into cloth that is then fulled and shrunk to make it thicker, part of the wardrobe.

**Furlong**: 220 yards, the approximate length of a plough furrow.

**Garderobe**: a small toilet or latrine either built into the thickness of the wall or projected out from it.

**Gatehouse**: a complex of towers, bridges, and barriers that protect entrances through a town or castle wall.

**Gavelkind**: a form of inheritance by which property is divided among all sons instead of being left to the eldest.

**Gestum**: a portion of food and drink allotted to a guest.

**Great hall**: a building in the inner ward that housed the main dining and meeting area for residents of the castle.

**Guild**: trade associations meant to protect their members from competition and maintain commercial standards (e.g. merchant guilds, craft guilds).

**Half-timber**: walls made of wood frames were filled with panels of wattle and daub, a common form of medieval construction.

**Halimote**: a lord’s court.

**Hauberk**: a coat of mail.

**Hayebote**: the right to take wood from a forest in order to repair a fence.

**Hayward**: a steward in charge of haymaking during harvest time.

**Heriot**: the right of a lord to seize the property of a peasant upon their demise.

**Hide**: a tract of land sufficient to support a family, typically 120 acres. Also called a carucate.

**Hoarding**: a temporary wooden balcony suspended from the tops of towers and walls before a battle, from which missiles and arrows could be dropped or fired accurately toward the base of the wall.

**Hook or crook**: a dispensation permitting the peasants to gather firewood using only a hook and a crook, the origin of the phrase by hook or by crook.

**Housebote**: the right to take wood from a forest in order to repair a house.

**Housesteads**: forts strategically placed on a craggy precipice.

**Hue and cry**: the moral and legal obligation of peasants to assist in pursuit and capture of a criminal in their village.

**Hundredweight**: a measure equivalent to 4 quarters, 8 stone, or 112 pounds.

**Inguard**: bodyguards who protect the king in exchange for coin during royal visits.

**Inland**: land exempt from taxes.

**Inner curtain**: a wall built to enclose the inner ward.

**Inner ward**: an open courtyard in the center of a castle.

**Justiciar**: head of the royal judicial system.

**Kaiage**: a fee paid on loading and unloading of goods at a port or market town.

**Knight-service**: a form of tenure in which knights are granted a tract or fee of land in exchange for military service, typically of 1,500 acres.

**Lancet**: a narrow high window with a pointed arch.

**League**: a measure of distance equivalent to 3 miles. At sea, a league is 3 nautical miles (3.452 miles).

**Livery**: a modified form of a crest or sigil worn by servants of a royal or noble family.

**Machicolation**: an opening in the floor or between the corbels of a parapet used for attacking besiegers.

**Mangonel**: a siege engine for throwing stones; a type of trebuchet.

**Marcher lord**: the lord of a border territory.

**Marches**: border territory.

**Market**: a place where goods were bought and sold established in a village or town, with authorization from a king or lord who provided his protection in exchange for a fee that also paid for economic and judicial privileges afforded to its merchants.

**Medale**: drinking festivities held after meadows are mowed.

**Men-at-arms**: soldiers who held 60-120 acres of land in exchange for military service.

**Merlon**: a high segment of alternating high and low segments of a battlement.

**Mesnie**: household military personnel.

**Messaline**: soft lightweight silk with a satin weave.

**Messor**: an official who oversaw mowers or reapers.

**Messuage**: a portion of land set aside for a dwelling.

**Moat**: a deep trench dug around a castle to prevent access from the surrounding land. It could be either left dry or filled with water.

**Mortar**: a mixture of sand, water, and lime used to bind stones together permanently; it retains its flexibility and so the stone resists the shocks of battering.

**Motte**: a manmade or natural mound on which a keep was built.

**Multure**: payment of a portion of grain to the lord who owns a mill.

**Napery**: a room where the table linens are washed and stored.

**Newel**: the center post of a winding or spiral staircase.

**Niello**: a black mixture, typically of sulfur, copper, silver and lead, used to inlay engraved or etched metal.

**Oubliette**: a concealed dungeon having a trap door in its ceiling as its only opening where prisoners were often left to starve to death, sometimes in total darkness.

**Outer curtain**: a wall built to enclose the outer ward.

**Outer ward**: the area surrounding the inner curtain.

**Outlands**: the outlying lands of an estate, typically granted to peasants.

**Oxgang**: a tract of land equal to an eighth of a hide, 15 acres. Also called a bovate.

**Palatinate**: a lord exercising powers ordinarily reserved for a king (e.g. minting coins). Also called _in sicut regale_.

**Palfrey**: a lightweight horse with a smooth ambling gait, suitable for riding long distances.

**Palisade**: a wooden fence typically built to enclose a site until a permanent stone wall can be constructed.

**Pannage**: a fee paid to a lord for rights to let their animals feed in the forest.

**Parage**: the portion of land and wealth obtained by a woman upon marriage to her husband.

**Pasture**: enclosed or managed land where livestock grazed.

**Payage**: tax levied on pasturage.

**Peck**: a dry measure equivalent to 2 gallons or a quarter of a bushel.

**Pele tower**: a tower stronghold without outer defensive walls.

**Pickage**: a fee paid to set up booths at fairs.

**Pinfold**: a place for confining stray horses or livestock.

**Pone**: a decree removing action from a lord’s court into the royal court.

**Pontage**: tax levied for crossing a bridge.

**Portcullis**: a heavy wooden or metal latticed grille that could be raised or lowered over an entrance or passage.

**Postern gate**: a side gate into a castle.

**Putlog hole**: a hole intentionally left in the surface of a wall for insertion of a horizontal pole.

**Pytel**: a small enclosed field.

**Quarter**: a measure equivalent to 2 stone or 28 pounds.

**Quintain**: a dummy with a shield mounted on a post, a target used for tilting.

**Quitrent**: a payment for distinct rights that would free someone from their feudal obligations while allowing them to remain in the demense of their lord.

**Quittance**: an exemption from specific taxes or duties. Also, receipts or acknowledgments of payment.

**Rampart**: a defensive earth or stone wall surrounding castle.

**Rangeland**: unenclosed and unmanaged land where livestock grazed, often with natural vegetation.

**Reeve**: an official either appointed by a lord or elected by peasants.

**Relief**: a fee paid to a lord by the heir of a vassal in order to succeed an estate.

**Refectory**: a room where repairs are made or scheduled, and where things in need of repair are stored.

**Replevy**: returning seized property to its owner.

**Rookery**: a room where the ravens live and from which messages are sent.

**Rouncey**: a type of all-purpose horse that could be ridden into battle. Coursers, destriers, and rounceys were generically referred to as chargers.

**Royal domain**: lands that belonged to the king which generated the revenue he was expected to survive on.

**Sack**: a measure with varying amounts of weights (e.g. a sack of wool is 364 pounds, a sack of grain was 280 pounds).

**Sangar**: a low defensive wall or earthwork dug into a battlefield.

**Saucery**: a room where sauces are made, part of the kitchens.

**Scaldinghouse**: a room where the utensils and carcasses of animals are scalded, part of the kitchens.

**Sceat**: a payment levied to fund maintenance of the walls and defenses of a castle or town.

**Scullery**: a room where dishes are washed, clothes are laundered, and water is boiled for cooking and bathing, part of the kitchens and laundry.

**Scutage**: land tax on the holdings of landed knights paid by the lord who granted the land to the knight, who can take ownership of the land by paying it themselves and buying their lord out.

**Seigniory**: the duty lords had to serve in the military, to hold court, to answer the call of their king, to protect and provide for their people.

**Selion**: a ridge in between two furrows meant to divide an open field.

**Serf**: a peasant bonded to the land who paid certain dues to a feudal lord in exchange for the use of the land and protection. These dues, known as corvee, often consisted of physical labor for three days a week on average.

**Serjeanty**: a form of tenure somewhere in between knight-service and socage, encompassing non-standard military service and household service.

**Sewery**: a room where the cloth and sewing implements are stored and clothes are repaired, used as a storeroom for provisions, linens, and furniture; part of the wardrobe.

**Smallholder**: a peasant who holds more land than a cottager but less farmland than a crofter. Also called a bordar.

**Socage**: a form of tenure in which farmers hold their land for a rent fee paid to their lord in exchange for protection. Their rent could be paid in coin or food supply, or a combination thereof.

**Sokeland**: a tract of land belonging to its occupants (i.e. peasants) rather than a lord.

**Solar**: a private room often on a balcony over the great hall, used by the lord and his guests.

**Spencery**: a room where raw meat is larded and preserved and stored, part of the kitchens. Also called a larder.

**Spicery**: a room where spices are made and stored, part of the kitchens.

**Squire**: an aspiring knight, typically one serving and being trained by a knight with the expectation of being knighted eventually.

**Stallage**: tax levied on booths or stalls at markets and fairs.

**Stone**: a measure equivalent to 14 pounds.

**Sulong**: a tract of land equal to two hides, 240 acres.

**Sumpter**: a pack animal; typically a packhorse, mule or pony.

**Syllabub**: a medieval drink that has become a modern dessert. It’s made of heavy cream mixed with sherry or cider, juice squeezed from citrus fruit (e.g. orange or lemon), grated lemon peel, and refined sugar.

**Tallage**: an arbitrary tax levied by the king on the towns and lands of the crown.

**Tenure**: in the context of feudalism, tenure is the conditions upon which land is held and occupied.

**Tillage**: land under cultivation.

**Toft**: the site of a house and of its outbuildings.

**Toll**: a fee paid to a lord in order to sell livestock.

**Trebuchet**: a type of siege engine in the form of a giant sling.

**Truss**: frames built to support the roof of the great hall.

**Turbary**: the right to cut peat or turf. Also referred to the portion of bogland where the peat or turf was extracted.

**Turning-bridge**: a type of wooden drawbridge pivoted on an axle and working like a see-saw, with a counterweight attached to the end nearer the gateway. This required a large chamber below the bridge to receive the counterweight.

**Turret**: a smaller tower rising above and resting on one of the main towers, typically used as a lookout point.

**Ultimogeniture**: the right by which the youngest son inherits lands, titles, and property from their father; the opposite of primogeniture.

**Undercroft**: a cellar, crypt, or basement under a building.

**Vassal**: landholders who paid homage and swore fealty to a lord and thus owed them various obligations, including military service, advisory, and feudal aids.

**Vill**: a tract of land containing 5-10 hides.

**Virgate**: a tract of land equal to a quarter of a hide, 30 acres. Also called a yardland.

**Wallwalk**: an area along the tops of walls from which soldiers defend both castle and town.

**Wardship**: the right of a lord to the income of a fief before its heir comes of age. This obligates the lord to maintain the holding, to care for their ward, and to return the fief to him once he comes of age in the same condition that it was in when the wardship began.

**Warland**: land not exempt from taxes.

**Warren**: an enclosed piece of land set aside for breeding game, particularly rabbits.

**Waste**: uncultivated or unarable land exempt from taxes, sometimes land destroyed by war or raids.

**Wattle and daub**: wattle made by weaving thin branches or slats to form a wooden lattice is daubed with a sticky material typically made of wet soil, clay, sand, grass and straw.

**Weavery**: a room in which thread is spun and woven into cloth.

**Weregild**: a fee paid as restitution for injuring or killing a person.

**Withdrawing room**: a small chamber attached to a larger chamber where people could withdraw for privacy, the precursor to a drawing room.

**Woolen**: yarn spun from shorter, finer, curlier fibers to weave a type of wool cloth that was soft and smooth with an unnoticeable weave.

**Worsted**: yarn spun from longer, thicker fibers to weave a type of wool cloth that was lightweight and sturdy with a visible weave.

**Yoke**: a tract of land equal to half a hide, 60 acres.


	25. Prologue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 2**  
Prologue 
> 
> Wynne and Roose go even further north.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **WARNING**: HERE THERE BE SMUT, interspersed with me throwing shade at the misogyny of Aristotle. Aristotle wrote in _Politics_ that “the relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled” (1245b12), but that husband and wife “tend by their nature to be on an equal footing and to differ in nothing” (1259b5). So, for a man of his time (i.e. the fourth century BCE), his misogyny wasn’t as virulent as it could’ve been. I’mma still throw shade, though.
> 
> My work from home job is more all-consuming than I thought it would be, so I don’t have much time for writing. Unless you count transcribing. I’m posting the first arc of Book 2 because it’s been completed for months now, and it’s pretty self-contained despite being the beginning of a longer narrative. My best friend Catherine also wanted to read it, so…here we are. There will be weekly updates from now until August twenty-second. YEET.
> 
> @ladyoflosgar, I know you’re here for Domeric/Sansa, so I feel the need to warn you that neither of them appear in this arc. Beware.

**Already the iron door of the north**  
**clangs open: birds, leaves, snows**  
**order their populations forth,**  
**and a cruel wind blows.**

Stanley Kunitz, “End of Summer”

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅠⅩ ❧**

298 AC

_On the Kingsroad bound for Castle Black, the ancient seat of the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, the stronghold where the Kingsroad ends, near the center of the Wall in the Gift, land granted in perpetuity to the Night’s Watch that nevertheless is still part of the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

Estival snow fell upon the North and cloaked the land in eight feet of white powder that glistened in the sunlight. It was still summer snow rather than a herald of autumntide, because the sun was unobscured by thick nimbostratus clouds that hung like a dark adumbral veil in the firmament during each winter and because the snow was soft enough to crumble underfoot at the first kiss of a boot. Brumal snow was packed hard enough to stand on and frozen through with veins of ice like crystalline blood.

Beyond the Wall there was firn, old snow that hadn’t melted in years. Not even a decade of summertide could thaw such cold. Wynne closed her eyes as she breathed in ambient magic and converted that energy into warmth every time she exhaled. For magic was everywhere if you know where to look.

There was magic in the currents of a river, in the petals of a flower, in the blood of every living thing. When one season changed into another, magic was made. When the tides came in, magic was made. When the moon orbited around the earth, magic was made. When the earth orbited around the sun, magic was made. When a seed was sown, magic was made. When trees grew, magic was made. When a harvest was reaped, magic was made.

During the fabled Age of Heroes and the Age of the Hundred Kingdoms, the Starks of Winterfell had began to conquer the North by gaining the allegiance of the hill tribes in the northern mountains before they drove the giants from their kingdom and felled the skinchanger and shapechanger Gaven Greywolf along with all of his skinchanger and shapechanger kin in the savage War of the Wolves. Then the Starks drove the Blackwoods from the dark forest they renamed the wolfswood and divided the conquered lands amongst the Glovers and Tallharts. After the Thousand Years War, the kings and queens who ruled Barrowton, Oldcastle, Blackpool, the Last Hearth, the Rills, and Stony Shore had become loyal vassals of the Starks. Then, with the strength of the armies of their vassals, they conquered Sea Dragon Point and deposed the Warg King before they set their sights on the Neck. It wasn’t long before every non-human in the North had fled north of the Wall, and while the male lines of every magical bloodline that opposed the Stark conquest were extinguished, the Starks attempted to maintain a monopoly on magic by marrying the daughters of the kings they had slain: the last Barrow Princess, the Warg King’s daughters, the last Marsh Princess. This, Wynne surmised, must be the reason all of the Starks born in the last two decades were skinchangers. Or more specifically, wargs. However, the consanguineous marriages that stemmed from the Stark dynasty ensured the magic of the North wasn’t bred out of the bloodlines that survived.

Since the death of the last dragon, magic in Westeros had waned. It had been dwindling for thousands of years as winter encroached upon all other seasons, until the long summer began and magic came back with a vengeance. There were those who could use magic—sorcerers, witches, warlocks, wizards, alchemists—those who simply _were _magic, and those who got the best and worst of both worlds.

One of her unborn sons kicked her in the spleen. Wynne opened her eyes and sucked in air, her fingers reflexively furling into something that was less fists and more hands that had forgotten they didn’t have claws. It didn’t hurt because the bones of her little boys were soft as skeletons go, but there was the odd sensation of a small foot being somewhere a foot shouldn’t be. Specifically, in the vicinity of her melancholy. “I miss when your legs were tiny buds,” she muttered, “the better to _not_ kick me with.”

Roose chuckled softly, a low sound that she felt more than heard with her back against his chest as they sat alone in a wheelhouse ascending the Kingsroad. Vermithora—her dragonling—snoozed in the seat on the other side of the carriage, plumes of verdant smoke curling up from the slits of her nostrils as her black scales glimmered with a metallic sheen of green and bronze in the sunlight that dripped in through a gap betwixt the velvet curtains. Roose splayed one of his strong hands over her belly to feel their son kick again; the other squeezed her shoulder while he kissed the side of her neck. “Maester Tybald says our sons can hear us now,” he whispered.

Anything the maesters of the Citadel knew about gestation was learned from dissecting the corpses of lowborn pregnant women, preterm babies that were born too soon to survive and fetuses miscarried at various stages of development. Science was a cruel mistress. Although most of them didn’t kill their research specimens themselves, some did pay for procurement by people without scruples. Those maesters justified their methods with the cold equation. If the loss of a single life saved many, then it was a sacrifice worth making. Nothing could heal without being wounded first.

Wynne turned her head away from the intrusive thoughts and nuzzled her husband’s unshaven cheek with her nose before he cupped her face and kissed her to welcome her back from the liminal space inside her mind. His thin lips were dry, and he tasted of the powder he used to clean his teeth: a mixture of sage and cloves and salt. Roose made another low sound deep in his throat as she nipped his upper lip and the blade of his nose bumped against her flushed cheek. It coalesced in his chest as she curled her fingers around his wrist and squeezed gently. “We’re an hour away from Castle Black,” she told him once she broke the kiss.

Ned Stark had sent a raven to his brother at Castle Black five moonturns ago. There were three orders in the Night’s Watch—rangers, builders, and stewards—and three officers who commanded them. Benjen Stark was First Ranger, and only the Lord Commander and Lord Steward held more sway within the brotherhood of crows. Another raven had flown to King’s Landing to request permission from the crown to undertake a diplomatic mission. House Bolton had offered to repay the debts owed by the crown to the Iron Bank if permission was granted. One million golden dragons paid to the Iron Bank, and a million gifted to the Night’s Watch to repair the castles on the Wall that had fallen into disuse. Wynne still had over ten million dragons hoarded from her dowry, the parage she gained upon her marriage to Roose, and from the profits of the overseas investments she began making a decade ago. However, she did not want to spend her entire fortune on the prophesized War for the Dawn.

Jeor Mormont, the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, had believed the claim that white walkers were stirring beyond the Wall. This, he believed, must have been the true purpose of the brotherhood: to guard the realms of men against their true enemy. Jeor had sent Benjen to parley with Mance Rayder in the Frostfangs, and Mance had taken Benjen hostage. Another ranger known as Black Jack Bulwer had returned with a list of demands. One of those demands was to meet the greenseer that Benjen had spoken of.

Beyond the Wall, greenseers were seen as they once were among the Children of the Forest: as leaders chosen by the gods themselves. Their last greenseer had died half a century ago, but she had a daughter who inherited the greensight. Mother Mole was a woodswitch prone to green dreams, visions and prophecies. Tens of thousands of wildlings had pledged their fealty to the King beyond the Wall because of her.

Mance had cultivated an alliance with a woodswitch. At his right hand sat a skinchanger known as Varamyr Fiveskins who held three grey wolves, a snow bear, and a shadowcat under his thrall. Wynne didn’t know what Mance wanted from her, but he knew more about greenseers than most people and that fact made her feel even more anxious than usual.

Wynne _did _know he was married to a woman named Dalla. Most wildling subcultures had broken the tradition of matrimony centuries ago, so Mance choosing to marry Dalla meant that he wasn’t as wild as he claimed to be. Their denotation of “wife” carried the connotation that word once had in the Old Tongue of the First Men: _wyf_, meaning “woman.” Spearwives were warrior women, not married to their weapons. Mance had married to flout his vows to the Night’s Watch. _I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men_.

Roose scraped his teeth over her pulse of her neck in mild warning. It annoyed him when he wasn’t the recipient of her full attention. “How should we occupy ourselves until then?” he whispered.

Wynne tipped her head back onto her husband’s shoulder as their quieter son moved inside of her, blindly reaching for something he couldn’t see. “I want to name our sons,” she said, “I can’t keep thinking of them as the Reticent One and the Rambunctious One.”

Roose nuzzled the shell of her ear and nipped hard enough to make her squirm. “What do you think of Rogar?” he asked her.

Wynne bit her lip as she considered that namesake. Rogar Bolton had been the last Red King of the Dreadfort. When the Andals invaded the shores of the Shivering Sea, he bent the knee to the King of Winter and sent his sons to Winterfell as hostages to ensure that his line would not be extinguished if the Andals breached his fortress. Rogar defeated them and lined the shores with their flayed corpses as a grisly warning. “After the Huntsman,” she murmured.

“Yes.” Roose slipped one hand through a slit in her skirts designed for drawing the axe she carried sheathed and strapped to her thigh. It was a small doloire topped with a spike made to pierce armor. Roose bypassed the holster and leggings she wore to press a tantalizing fingertip against the silk gusset of her smallclothes, her gravid belly cradled in the crook of his strong arm while his finger stroked up and down her slit torturously slow. “Our firstborn should have a Bolton name,” he said blithely, as though his hand wasn’t between her legs.

Wynne arched her back and circled her hips as his fingers dipped beneath the soft lace trim of her underthings. Roose cupped her as she rubbed her voluptuous ass up the length of him through her skirts and his breeches, his thumb ghosting over the hood of her clit so gently that her breath snagged and caught as her pulse spiked and he made a satisfied noise low in his throat. Wynne smiled as his cock twitched and he frotted slowly against her; he was hard for her and she was sopping wet for him.

_For every action_, she thought as his fingers split her open and spread her juices over the lips of her cunt, _there exists an equal and opposite reaction_.

According to the Mother’s Book of the _Seven-Pointed Star_, it was sinful for a man to desire pregnant women and profane for a husband to fuck his pregnant wife. Wynne had read the holy texts of the Andals out of curiosity, but most of their beliefs had seemed overzealous to her. Then again, the North seemed half savage to southron lords and ladies.

_High septons used to preach that promiscuity of the mind led to promiscuity of the body_, Wynne thought. _Which is why septas haven’t written as many books, historically. Maesters have written that women are inferior to men, that our courage lies in obedience while the courage of men lies in command. According to the scholars of the Citadel, women are more impulsive, envious, mischievous, querulous, deceptive, shameless, despondent, and more apt to scold and strike. Most people don’t seem to realize that men have ulterior motives for making women believe we are inferior. It keeps us soft and pliant, keeps us dependent on them. Although that scholar also believed a man should be faithful to his wife, hold her as his own and trust her before all others. Which is how Roose treats me, and that is why our sex is not about our duty or his pleasure alone. I am his, and he’s mine_.

Wynne moaned as his callused thumb circled her clit, taunting her until she felt swollen and slick and shameless. “Our second born should have an arborescent name,” she said as his other hand curled under her chin and tilted her head up so he could draw a taut string of kisses from her shoulder to the hinge of her jaw. “Bloodraven says he’ll be a greenseer.”

“Avery,” Roose whispered and his breath was hot and heavy in her ear, “it was my grandfather’s name. In the Old Tongue it means—”

Wynne made a lewd noise that she refused to classify as a whimper. “Eldritch ruler,” she whispered back.

Roose kissed her, his fingers and thumb clamping down on her clit to pinch and twist it as he thrust his tongue into her open mouth; his lips were soft but utterly merciless, coaxing her tongue into his mouth and sucking upon it until she squealed and squirmed. Wynne moaned into his mouth as the kiss turned voracious, bruising and brutal in its intensity.

There was nothing half so sweet as feeling her fall apart in his arms. Wanting him. Trusting him. Needing him. It was potent. It was precious. It was peace.

“Come for me, sweet girl,” he ordered softly, whispering in her ear and nibbling on her earlobe while he stroked her swollen clit ruthlessly.

When she came, he covered her mouth to stifle her scream and nuzzled her neck as her whole body shuddered with the force of her orgasm. Roose ignored the insistent throb of his cock and crooked two fingers into her, the heel of his palm grinding against her clit as his fingertips sought a sweet spot inside her little cunt that made her writhe and thrash. _More_, he thought as she mewled and panted into the palm of his other hand.

“Again,” he commanded.

By now he’d trained her to come on command under the right circumstances, exploiting her response to his touch and to his voice. Wynne kept herself apart from the rest of the world, insensate. It was partly due to the nature of her magic, the panoptic view of her third eye. Wynne _saw_ everything, but greenseers couldn’t touch or smell or taste the past; she’d explained her theory that her ability to absorb so much information was predicated on sensory deprivation, because otherwise greenseers would go mad. It was logical, then, for a woman who spent most of her time in a metaphysical space that deprived her of three or four of the five senses in exchange for a preternatural sixth to respond exquisitely to intense tactile and even auricular stimulation.

Sometimes his wife forgot about the world that could only be experienced with human eyes, human ears, human skin. Roose was only too happy to remind her of the sweet warm flesh that contained the magic of her mind, of when and where she truly belonged. “You belong with me,” he whispered to her as her cunt fluttered and constricted around his fingers, her soft thighs quivering. “You’re _mine_.”

Wynne had coated his hand in her wetness as she came, but he wasn’t a squeamish man. Boltons couldn’t be. _My family has far too much blood on our hands_, he thought. Another man might wonder what he’d done to deserve her. Roose knew he’d done nothing to deserve his lands and titles, his valiant son, or his lovely young wife.

Roose had known that he was abnormal since he was a boy. Most people were capable of empathy. Roose was not. Most people felt remorseful when they’d done something bad. Roose did not. Most people were emotional. Roose was not. It wasn’t as though he felt _nothing_. Roose had feelings; he just didn’t permit those feelings to rule him or feel the need to put them on display. What he lacked was compassion.

Which had never bothered him, since his amorality had served him well. It was as much of a weapon as his longsword or his flaying knife—a weapon he had honed for decades. When he was younger, he was indiscreet and impulsive. Not unlike his bastard had been. Roose had only learned how to control his impulsivity because his father had attempted to beat the indiscretion out of him. It had worked to a certain extent, though mitigating his behavior didn’t stop the beatings; his father had merely stopped pretending he needed an excuse for perpetrating such violence.

It was also the reason he’d never raised a hand against his wives or his own son. Nor would he. It was perhaps the only line that he’d never crossed, a line he’d drawn for himself out of spite rather than any pretense of righteousness.

Roose had never been a good man, but he was good to Wynne. It didn’t matter whether he deserved her or not. Wynne had chosen to belong to him, and he wasn’t going to give her cause to change her mind. “Your cunt welcomes me so eagerly,” he whispered to her as he slowly dragged the smooth edges of his teeth over the side of her neck and stroked the sting with his tongue. “Your mouth shapes my name. Your skin turns such exquisite shades of red. All of that is mine.”

Wynne exhaled a tremulous gasp of laughter before she turned and looked at him over her shoulder. It was perhaps the loveliest sound in the world, second only to his name on her tongue. “Yours,” she whispered back, her sweet voice lurid and heavy with pleasure.

Roose smiled and kissed her as gently as he knew how, trying to convey an emotion that he lacked the proper lexicon to name. Instead he cupped her face as she kissed him back and cooed at the sensation of his skillful fingers still moving deep inside of her. Wynne curled her fingers around his forearm and clutched the fabric of his sleeve, tension bleeding out of her body until her muscles felt helpless and soft. More of her was the only thing he wanted, needed, craved.

Then she abruptly stopped responding to him. Panic gnawed at his throat and he opened his eyes to see that her eyes had gone eldritch white, her eyelashes fluttering like frenzied wings as they always did when his wife had waking visions. This wasn’t something that happened often, since waking visions only occurred when she touched a weirwood tree in order to glean information or when something that she foresaw in one of her prophetic dreams came to pass.

_Jon Arryn is dead_, Roose deduced, _and now the game truly begins_.


	26. Battle of the Haunted Forest {I}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 2**  
Chapter 1: Battle of the Haunted Forest {I}
> 
> Wynne and Roose arrive at Castle Black, where they are introduced to Prince Aegon Targaryen.

**Out there may be monsters, my dear.**   
**But in you still lives the dragon**   
**you should always believe in.**

Nikita Gill, “Once Upon a Time II”

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅩ ❧**

298 AC

_At Castle Black, the ancient seat of the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, the stronghold where the Kingsroad ends, near the center of the Wall in the Gift, land granted in perpetuity to the Night’s Watch that nevertheless is still part of the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

Castle Black wasn’t a castle. It was a collection of stone towers and wooden keeps in various states of disrepair. There were no walls to defend them, only the Wall at their back. Each building lurked atop wormwalks dug under the earth to keep the watchmen from getting frostbite and freezing to death when the snow heaped and the icy wind howled. Those subterranean passages were seldom used during the summer, but in winter they were all that held the castle together.

Six hundred men were stationed at the stronghold in the shadow of the Wall, all dressed in roughspun black wool. Most of those men were either peasants who committed capital crimes, minor nobility who supported House Targaryen during the rebellion, or highborn men who had chosen to take the black. Elsewise, highborn men were rarely punished for their crimes.

_This is where my lord husband should be_, Wynne thought as she tucked her sleeves into her mittens to avoid bleeding her warmth into the chilling air._ What he did is abhorrent, but I’m happy that he’s mine instead of gelded or beheaded or a man of the Night’s Watch. Even if that makes me more of a monster_.

Roose emerged from the wheelhouse first and took her hand to help her, since her center of gravity had been drastically altered by their unborn sons; his other hand splayed over the small of her back as the wayns of food and other supplies they’d brought rolled in behind them. Vermithora was curled over her shoulders beneath the hood of her cloak, delicate wings folded and squamous tail coiled loosely around her neck. Locke shut the door of the carriage behind them and went to give his half-brother Ser Mallador a manly hug while dozens of watchmen flocked in the courtyard to witness their arrival. _One for sorrow_, Wynne thought, _and two for mirth. Three for a funeral, four for a birth, five for silver and six for gold. Seven for a secret never to be told. Eight for a wish and nine for a kiss. Ten for a bird you must not miss_.

Jeor Mormont was a bear of a man, in the figural and literal sense of the phrase; he was on the cusp of seventy and he cut an imposing figure with his stern gaze, broad shoulders and barrel chest. On his shoulder perched a raven, who quorked at her as the Lord Commander kissed her hand. “Lord Bolton,” he said gruffly. “My lady.”

Wynne extracted a small jar of ellipsoid tomatoes from one of the many pockets sewn covertly into her skirts. Most red, orange and yellow tomatoes were savory, but darker tomatoes were sweeter. These were black icicle tomatoes that she cultivated herself, with skins that bled from red to black and succulent dark flesh. “Lord Commander,” she greeted courteously as she offered the fruit to the raven. Another corvid was perched atop the Lord Commander’s keep, watching her. _Bloodraven_, she thought as the telltale tingle of recognition knotted her flesh into lumps of gooseprickles that had nothing to do with the cold.

“Rich,” the raven quorked after it had swallowed the morsel and eyed the open jar with its head cocked in a manner that was both hopeful and predatory.

Wynne smiled and offered the bird a second black tomato. Five years ago, Mel and Dacey had caught Ser Jorah Mormont and his second wife, Lady Lynesse Hightower, attempting to flee to Essos in order to escape his execution. Ser Jorah had sold poachers to a Tyroshi slaver in order to pay off his debts, because he beggared himself to keep his wife happy and thus his people had been poaching because elsewise they would not have survived. Lord Stark had executed Ser Jorah and sent Lynesse back to Oldtown, where she remained for only a year before a Lysene merchant prince took a shine to her and she agreed to become his concubine. Maege Mormont had sent Longclaw, the ancestral sword of House Mormont, to Castle Black in the aftermath. Jeor didn’t seem to know her sister had prevented his only son from escaping justice, and Wynne had no intention of dredging that up. Instead she fed the raven and kept the slice of her smile in place.

“On behalf of the Night’s Watch,” Bowen Marsh said, “we offer thanks to House Bolton for your donation to our cause and name you friends of the Watch.”

Wynne snorted. “This is not a donation,” she retorted in a voice that carried like the raucous caw of a raven, “it’s an incentive. For eight thousand years, men of the Night’s Watch have fought the wildlings. My husband and I are here to make peace with their king and grant them passage into the Gift. Which is a course of action you neither approve of nor agree with, and _that_ is going to cause problems. I have spent two months on the Kingsroad watching you make half-baked plans to assassinate Mance Rayder and plot a half-assed mutiny against your own Lord Commander.”

That accusation incited a cacophony of outrage, muttered words coalescing into a dark snarl of sound. While some of the voices were horrified by such insubordination, others were dissident and defensive. This brotherhood was a powder keg, and it was going to implode. Another eventuality she didn’t need greensight to see.

Wynne sighed and hoped she wouldn’t get caught in the inevitable explosion. Vermithora bumped her tense jaw with her snout. Wynne stopped anxiously gnawing on the inside of her cheek and fed her dragon a tomato as the watchmen stared at the creature that had draped herself across her shoulders.

“My wife and I would like to stay at Deep Lake when we return to check on our investment,” Roose said in his soft voice, and the men quieted to listen.

Ser Alliser Thorne gave her belly a pointed look. “Shouldn’t your lady wife be in confinement?” the master-at-arms asked before he added with censure dripping from his tone, “the Wall is no place for a pregnant girl.”

Roose stared at him implacably. “My wife has come to end the war you and your brothers have waged for eight thousand years,” he said, “and to remind your order of its true purpose.”

Ser Alliser narrowed his black eyes at the Lord of the Dreadfort. “What purpose is that?” he asked.

“To protect Westeros from its true enemy,” said Roose, “the Others and their army of wights. I trust you remember Ser Waymar Royce, who died eight months ago during a ranging in the Haunted Forest. My nephew was arrogant, and he was given command over two more experienced rangers lest the Lord Commander offend his father. Gared survived the ranging and returned with tales of white shadows. Then he fled south because none of you believed him. Now it falls to Lord Stark to execute the man for breaking his oath, and it falls to me to warn those of you that remain. My nephew died as a man of the Night’s Watch, fighting the inhuman enemy that almost destroyed our ancestors before they built the Wall and founded your order to guard the realms of men. Now that ancient enemy has returned, and we are woefully unprepared to fight them. My wife and I are here to ensure the survival of the North. Anyone who stands against us will be…” he paused and let the implicit threat sink in before he shattered the silence that ensued and whispered, “…dealt with accordingly.”

Wynne tugged her bottom lip in between her teeth in a futile attempt to stifle a smile. Roose was amoral and ambitious—a terrible combination—but he meant it when he told her that marriage was an alliance and he would support her in perpetuity because she was his wife. Their marriage had become her fulcrum, something intimate and inexorably essential. _Give me a place to stand and a fulcrum_, she quoted from memory, _and I shall move the world_.

* * *

Prince Aegon Targaryen had taken his vows after he came of age two and a half years ago. On the night before he took his oath in the sight of the Seven, his great-granduncle had taken him aside. _Men of the Night’s Watch take no wives and father no children so they do not love_, the blind maester had said,_ for love is the bane of honor and the death of duty._ _We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy_.

When he was a boy of two, the honorable Lord Eddard Stark had sent him north with a wandering crow and ordered one of his bannermen to bring his three-year-old sister to Sunspear in order to protect them both from the wrath of the Usurper. Aegon knew the story of Prince Rhaegar and Lady Lyanna, though he’d heard it told over half a dozen ways. Rhaegar had stolen the she-wolf from the storm lord and locked her away in a tower. Lyanna had broken her betrothal to elope with the widowed silver prince, and Robert started a war to soothe his wounded pride. Rhaegar had gone mad at Harrenhal when he crowned Lyanna as his queen of love and beauty instead of Elia. Even the bitterest knights who once served House Targaryen had nothing but kind words to speak of Princess Elia Martell. Sers Jaremy and Jarman spoke of her goodness and cleverness, her sweet wit and her gentle heart. Even Ser Alliser only had nice things to say about his mother. Ser Alliser, who had more acrimony in his little finger than other men had in their entire bodies.

Rhaenys had some memories of their father, and precious few of their mother kept alive by their uncles. Aegon had none. Only the letters their father had written to Maester Aemon, letters in which he fervently claimed that his firstborn son would be the prince that was promised. Rhaegar had written _the dragon must have three heads_ in the final message that he sent north the night before he fell in battle at the ruby ford, three heads that symbolized the Conqueror and his sister-wives. Aegon knew he was the first head of the dragon, Rhaenys was the second, and the girl with pale violet eyes he saw in his dreams must be the third.

At the Battle of the Trident, Robert Baratheon had slain the last dragon with his warhammer. There were songs written about it, though his brothers were respectful enough that no one sang them in his hearing. Although he was born on Dragonstone, Aegon had never seen a _true_ dragon. Until now.

Vermithora was a beautiful creature with black scales that shone bronze and metallic green in the sunshine, bronze horns and a bronze crest, and green eyes. In between the delicate bones of her wings stretched green membranes known as patagia. Vermithor, the dragonling’s namesake, had been known as the Bronze Fury, the dragon hatched in the cradle of Jaehaerys the Conciliator, a fearsome beast with great tan wings. Aegon watched the snow begin to melt around her as she prowled, her wings furling and unfurling as emerald smoke rose in plumes from her nostrils. It made him feel almost a boy again, staring at the illustrations in Maester Aemon’s books and manuscripts. Aegon knew the names of every dragon ever hatched by his ancestors. Balerion the Black Dread, after whom Rhaenys had named the kitten their father had given her. Vhagar. Meraxes, ridden by his sister’s namesake and slain at Hellholt with a scorpion bolt. Quicksilver. Silverwing. Meleys the Red Queen. Tessarion the Blue Queen. Sunfyre the Golden. Syrax. Stormcloud. Dreamfyre. Caraxes the Blood Wyrm. Morghul. Moondancer. Morning. Vermax. Tyraxes. Arrax. Shrykos. Seasmoke. Sheepstealer. Grey Ghost and the Cannibal, wild dragons who died without ever being ridden. Seventeen of those dragons had been slain during the Dance of the Dragons, and the last dragon had died less than two decades later.

Aegon had never seen a greenseer before, either. Lady Bolton was unlike what he’d expected: she evoked neither winter nor spring as one might expect but autumn, with her volatile red-gold curls and hazel eyes. In the ice and snow, her delicate nose and plump cheeks were flushed red from the cold. When she tilted her head and looked at him, her lips curled into a shy cotyledon of a smile. It wasn’t flirtatious, but that smile of hers was contagious. Aegon had to smile back. Then he realized her smile had been calculated to evoke that response, and he was impressed; Lady Bolton was much too blunt to ever be truly charming, but she was manipulative enough to compensate for that.

Lord Bolton was a man fashioned of frostbite, with black hair and cold grey eyes as pale as mist; his gaze was dispassionate as a blade when he wasn’t looking upon his wife, his plain face devoid of emotion. Still, he was charismatic enough that hundreds of men quieted to hear all that he had to say, and they had listened. Lord and Lady Bolton were a force to be reckoned with, but so was he.

_I am Aegon of House Martell and House Targaryen_, he thought, _the blood of the dragon and Nymeria. I am a man of the Night’s Watch, the sword in the darkness, the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the shield that guards the realms of men. I am the prince that was promised, and mine is the song of ice and fire_.

Alas, knowing he was the one that was promised and fulfilling the prophecy he was destined to fulfill were two different matters entirely. Aegon had read every book and scroll he could find in search of more information about the prophecy. Then he searched all along the Wall for dragons to wake out of stone, for eggs clutched by Silverwing or any of the other dragons whose riders had visited the Wall, for the Red Sword of Heroes that Azor Ahai had forged with the soul and sacrifice of the woman he loved…and found nothing. Which had made him wonder if his father had truly been—as his Uncle Oberyn had ever so succinctly put it—full of shit. Now he was experiencing a strange brew of foreboding and eager anticipation, because he felt as though his destiny had come to call. Aegon had some difficulty with concealing the excitement that enkindled within him as verdant smoke wafted from the nostrils of the dragonling. Ephemeral green plumes unfurled in the cold air behind them as the steward escorted the Lord and Lady of the Dreadfort to the King’s Tower. It was something of a misnomer, since no king had visited the Wall in over a century. “How did you hatch a dragon egg?” he asked her, his curiosity at war with the greenest of envy.

“_Fire and Blood_ aren’t just words,” Lady Bolton said as one of the Dreadfort men held the door of the king’s chambers open, “they’re alchemical instructions. Not just any blood will do, however. There must be a…” she tugged her bottom lip in between her teeth before she articulated, “…magical resonance between the incubated dragonling and the one attempting to hatch the egg. I have two eggs I cannot hatch. No matter how much blood is spilled.”

Which explained why no dragon eggs hatched in the aftermath of the Tragedy at Summerhall. “Only the blood of the dragon can wake a dragon,” Aegon murmured as the door creaked shut behind them. “Aegon the Unlikely was missing that magical component, so his attempt failed.”

So much blood was shed at Summerhall, but no dragon eggs hatched. Archmaester Gyldayn, one of the few who survived the tragedy, had written that Summerhall was consumed by wildfire. It theoretically _should _have worked because magic was energy, and spells were transference of that energy through incantation or ritual or gesticulation.

Three dragons had died in the fire: Aegon the Unlikely, Princess Shaera, and Duncan Targaryen, the Prince of Dragonflies. Along with his wife, Jenny of Oldstones, his namesake, the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, and hundreds of smallfolk. Death for life, a potent exchange of energy.

It didn’t work because the magic of Westeros had waned and wildfire had done what that infernal substance was designed for and destroyed everything: the alchemical magic of the pyromancers, the palace, the lives of everyone who got too close to the green conflagration. Only the eggs were left unburnt among the ruins. After he was newly crowned, Jaehaerys the Clever had sent the unhatched dragons to Dragonstone where they remained for decades until Mayseline hoarded them.

“Most people believe that bloodmagic is evil,” Wynne informed the crow prince, “but they’re wrong. No form of magic is good or evil by itself. Whether magic is helpful or harmful is contingent upon the practitioner. There is the requisite blood sacrifice needed to perform bloodmagic, but that blood can be shed willingly. When people say virgin sacrifice, what they mean is someone whose lifeblood has never been drawn in the context of a magic ritual. Not a maiden or a boy who’s never dipped his wick. When I dabble in bloodmagic, I always shed my own blood.”

Roose kept a hand on the small of her back as a pair of men-at-arms in Dustin and Ryswell livery carried her trunk into the room. It was a calculated move on their part to bring men from the Dreadfort, Barrowton, the Rills, Karhold, Last Hearth, Deepwood Motte, Breakstone Hill, Winterfell and White Harbor; a visual reminder that House Bolton represented the entire North. Robb had even wanted to accompany them on their diplomatic mission, but Lord Stark forbade it.

“How does one dabble in bloodmagic?” the crow prince asked her.

Wynne clenched her jaw and inhaled to stifle a yawn, her teeth grinding tight inside her mouth as the yawn became a lump in her throat and she had to swallow it. “I use blood to light glass candles,” she answered, “and sometimes I feed my blood to weirwood trees. Mostly I do green magic, though. Or small magic, like…” she held up one hand and flicked her fingers in the confines of her mittens, “…this.”

Across the room, the latches of her trunk clicked and the lid opened like the gaping maw of a beast. Wynne furled her fingers like claws and felt the verdant pulse of her magic answer from the marrow of her bones as her gilded brass astrolabe floated out of her trunk and into her palm.

When she first learned how to move things with her mind, she made them move so fast she almost poked her eye out with a twig. It was crucial not to build up too much force, lest the impetus smack you in the face. Roose had gotten used to her doing small magic around him and was therefore unfazed, but Aegon was gobsmacked.

Although he wasn’t gaping at her, his deep indigo eyes had gone astonishingly wide. Wynne had retroactively seen Rhaegar Targaryen in the greenscape, and it was uncanny how much he resembled his father; his skin was much darker, but otherwise they looked just alike. Aegon had delicate Valyrian features and he was so tall he towered over Roose by half a foot, his silver-gold hair worn long and tied back with a thin piece of black leather. In his purple eyes lurked something fierce, and he moved with the honed ease of a warrior. Aegon was a fire the cold winds that blew over the Wall hadn’t snuffed out, a prince who could never claim his birthright. It brought the words of House Martell to mind: _Unbowed. Unbent. Unbroken_.

If she were the same person she once was—the one who only did magic in the dark or deep in the godswood where no one but the heart tree could see—his reaction would have exacerbated her anxiety. Now, she only hoped that he didn’t take after his father or grandfather in his temperament. Aerys had been a tyrant who tortured and slaughtered hundreds of people with impunity, delighting in burning them alive. Rhaegar was so entitled that he crowned the daughter of the Warden of the North and betrothed of the Lord Paramount of the Stormlands as his queen of love and beauty instead of his wife, a Princess of Dorne. Even though he knew it would be taken as a public declaration of his intention to make Lyanna Stark his mistress whether or not he intended to do so, and thus he planted the seeds that had grown into Robert’s Rebellion and inadvertently brought about the fall of the Targaryen dynasty. Rhaegar had only the best of intentions, but he was much too cavalier; and neither he nor Aerys were the sort of men that she would have entrusted with magic, especially magic so powerful as hers. Aegon had been raised at the Wall and the men of the Night’s Watch got only what they earned. How would he react to seeing magic in the flesh, even the smallest of magic?

Then he grinned at her, wide and forthright and warm. Wynne blinked, startled by the bright shine of his unalloyed smile. “That was amazing,” said Aegon.

“Yes,” Roose whispered in the low and deep voice that always made arousal lick up her spine and spark in the pads of her fingers, “she is.”

Wynne nestled into the crook of his strong arm, partly to remind him that his possessiveness was excessive and partly because it was cold even with the fire burning in the hearth; he smoothed the hand on her back to the curve of her hip and squeezed gently. _Mine_, the gentle pressure of his fingertips said. Wynne rolled her eyes at him surreptitiously and pointedly glanced at her pregnant belly.

_I married you and now I carry your twin sons inside me_, she thought,_ I literally could not be more yours_.

Which seemed to mollify him, once he deciphered the meaning of her unspoken communication. It was her magic the prince was in awe of, not her. Aegon had never seen the like before. It was also perhaps one of the worst-kept secrets within the brotherhood that Aegon preferred the company of men to women. Roose had nothing to be jealous of regardless, because she was his—and he was hers.

“How would you like to hatch a dragon of your own, Your Grace?” asked Roose.

Aegon beamed at him and his smile was a sliver of sunshine through a dark cloud. “I’d like that very much,” he answered.


	27. Battle of the Haunted Forest {II}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 2**  
Chapter 2: Battle of the Haunted Forest {II}
> 
> Wynne and Roose have dinner with the high officers of the Night’s Watch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of the differences between the book and show is who dies at the beginning. Will is killed by white walkers in _AGoT_, Prologue along with Ser Waymar Royce while Gared escapes and becomes the deserter whom Ned beheads in _AGoT_, Bran I. Ned beheads Will in the pilot episode of _GoT_ instead. I assume because the death of someone young has more impact than someone over fifty? IDEK.

**On a scale of bearable to feral, I am raised**   
**by wolves.**

Traci Brimhall, “Mystery, Play”

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅩⅠ ❧**

298 AC

_At Castle Black, the ancient seat of the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, the stronghold where the Kingsroad ends, near the center of the Wall in the Gift, land granted in perpetuity to the Night’s Watch that nevertheless is still part of the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

There was nothing comfortable about being one of two women at a table full of men.

Jeor Mormont sat at the head of the table with Roose to his right and Bowen Marsh, a rotund northman with a red face who styled himself as Lord Steward rather than First Steward, to his left. Othell Yarwyck, a lantern-jawed westerman, sat on the other side of Bowen. As the First Builder, he would oversee the repairs made to every abandoned castle on the Wall. Ser Jaremy Rykker, the knight to whom the Lord Commander had given command of the rangers after Benjen Stark was taken hostage, sat next to Othell; Ser Alliser was seated on his other side.

Wynne sat in between Roose and Maester Aemon while Aegon sat across from the humorless master-at-arms. Further down the table sat an assortment of principal Stark bannermen and their representatives: her uncle Ser Roger, the Master of Woodsedge. Ser Wendel Manderly, the second son of Lord Wyman. Karlon Umber, the second son of the Greatjon, accompanied by his younger twin brother Harlon. Arnold Karstark, the eldest son of Arthor Karstark, their bellicose cousin. Ellard Harclay, the dashing heir to Blue Moon Hill and representative of the hill tribes of the northern mountains as well as the Flints of Flint’s Finger and Widow’s Watch. Ser Helman Tallhart, the Master of Torrhen’s Square. Galbart Glover, the Master of Deepwood Motte. Lyra Mormont, the Lord Commander’s niece, a skinchanger.

Whilst the meal was served, the northmen began talking and laughing amongst themselves while the she-bear kept a watchful eye on the brothers in black. There was no trepidation in most of them, because they still didn’t believe that anything more dangerous than wildlings lurked in the frostbitten lands beyond the Wall.

With all of the snow on the Kingsroad, their journey to the Wall had taken a month longer than it should have. So the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch had time to summon men from the Shadow Tower, the castle where the King beyond the Wall had served under the Halfhand as a ranger until he abandoned his post.

After he lost three of the fingers on his right hand to a wildling’s axe that would have otherwise split his skull during his first ranging, Qhorin Halfhand learned to fight left-handed. When his fist was maimed, he blinded the axeman with spurts of blood and slew him while he was blind. Since that day, the wildlings had known no foe as implacable.

Qhorin sat at the foot of the table with his spine as straight as a spear; he was tall and clean-shaven with dark hair in a heavy long braid tinged with silver, and he wore blacks so faded they matched his dark grey eyes. When she entered the Lord Commander’s solar, he stood with the other men until she took her seat out of courtesy. There was a curtness about him, a gruffness forged of the ice and cold that made him steadfast and stalwart. Albeit in a rather austere manner. “You believe Mance is planning to break the Wall,” he said without preamble.

Wynne elegantly swept her skirts underneath her and sat back in her chair with Vermithora draped over her shoulders like a mantle, her posture impeccable. “No,” she retorted. “Mance does not want to break the Wall, despite the enmity he has toward the men who put his mother’s people to the sword and stole him from her. However, it makes for a fearsome threat,” she adjusted her eyeglasses with two fingers before she added, “or a good bargaining chip.”

“Let us pass safely through the Wall,” Roose murmured as a dolorous steward poured hippocras into his goblet, “and we won’t break it. Mance is hoping we won’t call his bluff. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean he won’t escalate if you refuse to allow the wildlings safe passage.”

Wynne nodded succinctly. “If you back a beast into a corner,” she said, “the beast will attack. Not because it wants to harm you,” she took a sip of the lemonsweet in her goblet to let that clarification sink in and said, “because at that point it has no other choice.”

“Most wildlings choose their leaders for their strength,” Aegon said, “and that means their king can’t afford to show any weakness. Which is why Mance won’t bend the knee: a king chosen by the free folk from beyond the Wall cannot kneel and hope to keep his crown. If you call his bluff, Mance will be forced to attack.”

Bowen frowned, his face seeming to redden. “Pardon my bluntness, my lord, my lady, but I have no softer way to say this. What you propose is treason. For eight thousand years, men of the Night’s Watch have stood upon the Wall and fought the wildlings. It would be treasonous to let them pass, to shelter them in our castles, to feed them and clothe them and show them how to fight.”

Wynne stared at him from behind her eyeglasses, her chin tilted in a manner that her lady mother had often described as recalcitrant. “I was twelve when my cousin and I encountered a party of sixteen wildling raiders,” she informed him, “they put a knife to Domeric’s throat and told me they wouldn’t kill him if I came with them willingly. I knew they were liars, but I love my cousin like a brother so I had no other choice but to obey. I watched them squabble over which of them would have the pleasure of raping me. Then, when their leader came and pinned me under him, I skinchanged into all of them at once and rendered them unconscious. I sang roots out of the earth to hold them down while I made strategic cuts and watched them bleed out slowly. Those wildlings killed my Silverwing, the mare I was gifted when I was two and she was a yearling. I experienced her death as though it were my own, so bleeding the life out of them felt like justice for my own murder. Thus, I have as much of a reason to hate the wildlings as any of you.”

Quiet reigned as the watchmen looked at her in horror. It seemed that slaying wildlings was worthy of respect only if men did the slaying, not when highborn girls saved themselves and stained their soft hands red with slaughter. Wynne stared back, unflinching and unrepentant. _I regret nothing_, she thought viciously. Roose took one of her hands and kissed her knuckles softly, his fingers tangling with hers like briars in a dark forest; the blood on her hands was never of any consequence to him, nor would it ever be. _If they won’t respect me_, she thought acerbically, _then I would have them fear me instead_. Bloodraven had always said it was better to be frightening than frightened.

“Your granduncle is Archmaester Willifer,” said Maester Aemon, his voice breaking the silence. Maester Aemon was pale and hairless and tiny, as though he had shrunk under the weight of the century he had lived. Although he spoke very softly, the high officers all fell silent to hear what he had to say.

Wynne nodded again more out of habit than anything else, because she knew he was blind and could not see her. “Yes.”

“I knew him when we were forging our chains,” the wise and wizened old maester said, “Willifer is a fine man with a mind for strategy…a mind it seems my lady has inherited. May I ask why you wish to allow the wildlings safe passage, if you despise them so?”

“Because this is not about me,” Wynne answered matter-of-factly, “or any of you. It’s about Westeros. All of Westeros, not only the realm of the Seven Kingdoms. When the Others come for us, they won’t care about the petty squabbles or prejudices we cling to. Lord Steward,” she turned and looked at Bowen, “they say that you have a head for counts and measures. Your men number under a thousand, and perhaps a quarter are skilled warriors. Mance has a hundred thousand wildlings. It matters not whether you believe me when I say the Others have returned, because the numbers do not lie. Mance is marching on the Wall regardless of whether or not you heed my warning. What chance does the Night’s Watch have against odds of over a hundred to one, living or undead?”

“We have superior tactics and weaponry,” Roose said after her question had gone unanswered, “but those odds aren’t in your favor. A smart commander does not underestimate his foes.”

* * *

As they spoke, Aegon became uncomfortably aware of what he had in common with the King beyond the Wall. Mance had more humble beginnings than he, but they were both raised as sons of the Watch. Neither of them had a choice in the matter. Mance had chosen the freedom of a life beyond the Wall, but Aegon couldn’t make the same choice. A crow prince he was, but still a prince of the Seven Kingdoms.

If his father had slain Robert at the Trident, he’d be the crown prince. What a difference one letter had made.

There would never be a crown for him. Rhaenys, his sweet sister, had taken it upon herself to reclaim his birthright for herself and restore House Targaryen to their rightful place on the Iron Throne. Perhaps he should have resented her for it. However, it was difficult to resent her because she was doing what he himself had no desire to ever do. Something that might very well have inevitably been forced upon him, were he not a man of the Night’s Watch.

Mormont and Maester Aemon had been training him to become the next Lord Commander ever since he could walk. Ser Alliser had taught him to wield a sword, bow, spear and dagger while he served as a page and squired for the Old Bear. After his fifteenth nameday, he went to visit his sister at Sunspear and met the uncles and cousins he’d only corresponded with before. When he returned to Castle Black a year later, he swore his oath and took his vows in the sight of the Seven. Ser Jarman had knighted him, and Septon Cellador had anointed him with the seven oils in the sept.

Aegon had no doubt that he belonged at the Wall. It was perhaps the only place where a crown prince would never become a king.

* * *

Wynne ate onion soup and fresh bread while the high officers talked and argued amongst themselves. It was best to let them air their grievances now, especially since they all knew their course of action had been decided the moment the king had affixed his royal seal to the peace treaty and sanctioned the diplomatic mission. There was no harm in letting them feel heard.

That didn’t mean she felt obligated to listen, however. Not after they had spent the better part of the meal talking over her.

Wynne surreptitiously opened her third eye. In the Shivering Sea a summer thunderstorm was gathering, the dark snarl of clouds lit by veins of bright lightning. Wynne skinchanged into a raven in the rookery at the Dreadfort and flew to warn the crabbers and fishermen moored in the estuary of the Weeping Water. It wouldn’t stop them from sailing on the morrow, but forewarned was forearmed and knowing a storm was coming might prevent their vessels from capsizing and sinking. After she mapped the path of the storm with her beak for them, she left the raven behind and flew higher on wings unseen by human eyes until the world spread out below her.

King Robert was riding north up the Kingsroad with a procession of hundreds: courtiers, knights, merchants and freeriders. Stannis rode a black destrier, his strong jaw perpetually clenched in a manner that she knew begat headaches while his squires, Devan Seaworth and Bryen Farring, rode beside him; his daughter Shireen rode behind him with Ser Davos Seaworth, her nose stuck in a huge leatherbound book while the onion knight held the reins of her mare. Renly had remained at court to make preparations for a scheme he was concocting to convince Robert to set aside his queen and marry Lady Margaery Tyrell. Dowager Princess Rhaelle was accompanying her elder grandsons to Winterfell; and she had made her first appearance at the royal court since the rebellion to do so. This was bittersweet, since Robert had slain Rhaegar in battle and justified the murder of his younger brothers Daeron and Jaehaerys during the Sack of King’s Landing by calling them dragonspawn, but Lord Steffon Baratheon had been dragonspawn himself and _that_ female line of descent had given Robert the strongest claim to the crown and to the Iron Throne in the aftermath of his rebellion.

Queen Cersei, Tommen, Myrcella, and Lord Tywin sat in a huge double-decked carriage of gilded metal and polished oak pulled by forty heavy draft horses. It was an opulent wheelhouse too wide to pass through the castle gates of Winterfell. Tion, Red Walder, and Tywin Frey, the sons and grandsons of Ser Emmon Frey and Lady Genna Lannister, and Robert Brax, the eldest son of Ser Flement Brax and Lady Morya Frey, had accompanied them to serve as pages and squires to Lord Tywin and to Ser Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer. Robert Brax was a grandson of Lord Walder Frey and Lady Alyssa Blackwood, and he was betrothed to Lady Bethany Blackwood, one of Wynne’s many Blackwood cousins.

Rhaenys and Tyene Sand, her pious and poisonous cousin, sat in a smaller carriage made of dark ebony wood; her retinue consisted of six ladies-in-waiting and seven knights. Ser Gerold Dayne rode a black sand steed with a mane as pale as snow; he was known as the most dangerous man in Dorne because he wielded the fire magic of House Dayne, and he had sworn his sword to the Targaryen princess after he earned his spurs because she was the only person he knew of who could withstand flame.

Wynne saw dark shadows everywhere, manifestations of the darkness that men held in their hearts. Sandor Clegane was dark as char beneath his tarnished helm and Gregor Clegane, the Mountain That Rides, loomed over his brother like a giant in armor hewn of stone. Thick viscous blood oozed black from underneath his visor. Ser Jaime wore the white cloak of the Kingsguard and golden armor that shone like sunlight, but in him lurked a shadow just as dark. Melisandre burned with her eyes and hair as red as hot coals, her appearance shifting between the crone she truly was and the seductive façade she donned like glamorous armor. Wynne saw through glamor because she could see through _everything_ when she opened her third eye.

Then she caught sight of something amiss on the Wall and snapped her third eye shut.

“Fucking _imbeciles_,” she hissed. This seemed to startle the high officers seated at the table. Wynne sighed and valiantly resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “I wasn’t speaking to you,” she informed them before she turned and looked over her shoulder at the steward. “Edd,” she addressed him, “you do go by Edd?”

“Yes,” he said. “Dolorous Edd, at your service, dread lady.”

“I need a mule,” Wynne told him with a smile at his form of address. “Or five. Roose,” she turned and looked at her husband before she elaborated. “We need to go to Queensgate.”

“Are we under attack?” Jeor Mormont asked.

“Nothing so dire,” Wynne assured the Lord Commander. “Robb Stark has disobeyed his father and followed us here.”

Roose heaved a sigh and stood in one smooth movement, the scrape of his chair on the stone floor accompanying his annoyance. “We should apprehend the heir to Winterfell before he gets himself killed,” he muttered.

“Precisely.” Wynne rose to her feet and tucked her hand in the crook of his elbow. “If the Others do not kill him, frostbite will. Prince Aegon,” she flicked her gaze to the crow prince, “Maester Aemon. I would have you both accompany us. There is something at Queensgate you must see.”

* * *

_At Queensgate, the castle once known as Snowgate, one of the sixteen abandoned castles along the Wall, east of Castle Black and west of Deep Lake_

* * *

Dark Sister was forged in Valyria before the Doom. It was commissioned by Lord Aenar Targaryen for Lady Aerea Targaryen, his twin sister and wife. Their children were Daenys the Dreamer and Gaemon the Glorious. It passed from her to their daughter, Lady Elaena Targaryen, who rode Balerion the Black Dread after her grandfather died, to her grandson Lord Aelyx Targaryen, to his grandniece Queen Visenya Targaryen, to Maegor the Cruel, to Jaehaerys the Conciliator, to Baelon the Brave, to Daemon Targaryen, to Aemon the Dragonknight, to Lord Bloodraven…and to her.

Shiera Seastar had cast the glamor meant to conceal the sword from those who might recognize an ancestral Valyrian steel blade of House Targaryen. Wynne had said the Star of the Sea was a sorceress who bathed in blood to keep her beauty. Shiera had left Westeros after Bloodraven went missing during a ranging beyond the Wall in 252 AC and sailed to Lys, her mother’s homeland, where she became one of the most renowned alchemists in the Free Cities. Three quarters of the Lysene populace was enslaved. It was much easier acquire bodies full of fresh blood in a place where people were for sale.

Aly had read every book and scroll in the Library Tower, and she had always dreamt of leaving Winterfell someday. Of striking out on her own and going someplace where it didn’t matter that she and her brother were bastard-born. Jon sometimes came along with her in her dreams, and sometimes he didn’t. Those imaginary adventures were something just for her and sometimes Aly didn’t want to share.

When they were children, Robb and Jon would spar in the courtyards with their wooden practice swords every morning and she would daydream until it was her turn. “I’m Prince Aemon the Dragonknight!” Jon would call out. Or, “I’m the Young Dragon!” Robb was Florian the Fool and Ryam Redwyne and Serwyn the dragonslayer. Those were daydreams, too; beautiful dreams that would never come true.

One morning, Jon called out “I’m Lord of Winterfell!” as he’d done a hundred times before and Robb had answered that he couldn’t ever be Lord of Winterfell because he was bastard-born. Lady Catelyn had told him so herself. Jon started training with Aly instead of Robb after that, and he never played at being a knight or a hero or a prince again. Robb was left with Theon and those smiles he wore like armor. Aly had only ever left Winterfell in her wildest dreams. Until now. It hadn’t taken much wheedling for Robb to convince her to fly with him on dragonback from Winterfell to Queensgate. This was her last chance to see the world from above without fear of falling.

“There’s no escaping this chill,” Jon murmured and shivered as they huddled up together with their direwolves inside the entrance hall of the empty castle while Robb started a fire in the nearest hearth. “In a few years, any man who takes the black must forget what it feels like to be warm.”

Aly laughed softly and fed the lantern they had brought more oil to keep the flame inside alive. Since they had flown here without alerting their father, they hadn’t brought many supplies. Aly collected twigs and pinecones for kindling in the wolfswood and Jon had snuck a few extra blankets from one of the storage rooms at Winterfell, but their supplies of water and provisions and whale oil were dwindling. It was infuriating how little they could do by themselves. “How was the execution?” she asked her brothers. Father had taken Bran to witness his first execution a fortnight ago, but Robb had found direwolves on their way home and she had forgotten to ask them about it because they had to feed and care for nine direwolf pups who hadn’t cut their milk teeth yet themselves.

“He died bravely,” Robb informed her, “the deserter. Gared, his name was. He had courage, at the least.”

Jon shook his head solemnly and clutched Ghost to his chest beneath his cloak as Robb added a handful of hay to the fire and it began to crackle almost happily. “No,” he said. “It was not courage. He was dead of fear. You could see that in his eyes.”

“He died well enough,” Robb said, unimpressed. Then, “Lord Bolton told us there would be more deserters from the Night’s Watch because of the Others and their wights. He was right.”

Aly smiled as Sable licked her cheek with her rough, warm tongue. If they returned to Winterfell alive, Father would be wroth. Aly still couldn’t think of him as her uncle, as anything but a father. “Father says the only time a man can be brave is when he is afraid,” she whispered as the flames burned higher.

Robb slung an arm around her shoulder and huddled up against her side so that she was nestled in between him and Jon. “Then we must be the bravest this night,” he whispered back.

Aly smiled wider as another laugh tumbled out of her mouth, half mirth and half lament. “When the snows fall and the white winds blow…” she began.

“…the lone wolf dies,” Jon finished, “but the pack survives.”

Aly nodded. Father had always said the same thing whenever any of his children squabbled. “I may behave like a lone wolf most of the time,” she admitted, “but you are my pack, my brothers, blood of my blood.”

“We must protect one another,” Robb murmured as Grey Wind burrowed into his lap, “keep each other warm. Share our strengths.”

Aly felt her sword hilt dig into her waist through all the layers of fur and heavy wool she wore. Then she closed her eyes and slipped into the skin of her dragon. It was strange to see with dragon eyes, because they saw a slant of light that human eyes could not and they possessed a farsightedness that was so far beyond human it made her woozy as she opened her own eyes again. “Wynne is here,” she told her brothers, “she found us.”


	28. Battle of the Haunted Forest {III}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 2**  
Chapter 3: Battle of the Haunted Forest {III}
> 
> Aly and Jon meet their half-brother.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As someone who actually has at least one half-brother I’ve never met, this was a weird chapter to write. I know R + L = J, but it bothers me when people in fandom act like Rhaegar and Lyanna are Jon’s real parents. Thanks! I hate it.

**All witches are selfish, the Queen had said.**

**But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because _they are mine!_**

Terry Pratchett, _The Wee Free Men_

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅩⅠⅠ ❧**

298 AC

_Atop the Wall, riding mules from Castle Black to Queensgate_

* * *

This was not how Roose had expected his night would go. After dinner, he’d planned to finish what he’d started in the carriage and fuck his sweet little wife. Roose feared the monsters lurking beyond the Wall, and he could only hope that his fear would keep them both alive on the morrow. Wynne had chosen to put herself and their unborn sons at risk to bring the wildlings into the fold. It was necessary, in order to prevent the eventuality of the Others slaughtering them and reanimating all hundred thousand of them as wights.

Roose was here to protect his lady, even though he knew he was no match for inhuman creatures forged of cold and darkness. If she died…

That was a possibility he refused to entertain. It sometimes felt as though Wynne had only come into his world to show Roose how empty his life would be without her.

Wynne rode a pure white mule abreast with him as the sun began to dip below the horizon, staining the sky vibrant shades of pink and red that caught in her magnificent hair. Vermithora rode on the grey mule with the old blind maester, warming him with her breath and scales. Wynne inhaled and softly began to sing “The Night That Ended,” her voice as sharp and pure as winter air. Fragile hope pricked deep in his chest like thorns at the exquisite sound. Roose had never before heard anything so primeval, nor so lovely. It was pure magic fashioned of sonance, and he understood why she was reluctant to sing at his court: because her voice made things grow even here where the ice and snow never melted.

“The Maiden of the Tree” was next. Wynne changed the lyrics somewhat, because the bawdy song had been written from the perspective of a man attempting to seduce a maiden in a forest. “The Dance of the Dragons” followed suit, sung in flawless High Valyrian that floated into the wind. Aegon sang the male verses, his sunlit voice so melancholy that Roose almost felt moved.

Those haunting ballads lasted until they arrived at Queensgate, the iron and wood portcullis raised as if to invite them inside. Roose dismounted from his mule and swept into the courtyard, where a valor of three full-grown dragons lurked with their eyes fixed upon him.

* * *

_At Queensgate, the castle once known as Snowgate, one of the sixteen abandoned castles along the Wall, east of Castle Black and west of Deep Lake_

* * *

Snowgate was built in between the Nightfort and Castle Black a thousand years ago. It was renamed over two centuries ago in honor of Good Queen Alysanne, who donated her jewels to pay for the construction of Deep Lake in between the Nightfort and Queensgate. Castle Black was built on the ground in the shadow of the Wall, but Queensgate stood atop the Wall. Its stone keep loomed tall and square while the small turrets at each corner and surrounding crenelated towers were round with conical roofs. There was no moat or barbican, only a thick mortar wall around the keep embedded in the enchanted ice of the Wall. It had been captured in 133 AC by a raider known as Sylas the Grim, whose army consisted of three thousand wildling troops. Lord Cregan Stark rode forth with levies from Winterfell, Deepwood Motte, Breakstone Hill, and Shadowmoor to join forces with the rangers of the Night’s Watch and retake the castle. It was abandoned shortly thereafter because the membership of the brotherhood had dwindled.

After the castle was abandoned, everything inside had been repurposed while Queensgate itself had fallen into disuse. Fragrant purple catmint, strawberries, winterberries, raspberries, dwarf pine trees, hostas and potatoes still grew in the aboveground courtyard. It was obvious that someone had been tending the garden, even though the castle was uninhabited. Elsewise, the berries would have withered. All but two of the plants were edible; catmint was a pest repellant and hostas kept weeds from growing by overshadowing them and sometimes by strangling their invasive roots. Thus, planting too many hostas was unwise because they would also strangle the roots of noninvasive plants if left to their own devices.

Frostfyre was curled in one corner of the courtyard like a giant squamous cat. Steelsong was chewing on the carcass of a sheep, the bones crunching as they broke in between his sharp black teeth. Proudwing sat back on his scaled haunches with his wings folded and stared at her sternly as she rode her mule out of the gatehouse. Frostfyre had scales as blue as frost that glittered with a sheen of silver, pale silver eyes with slit black pupils, argentate patagia membranes in between the bones of her wings, silver horns and spinal crest, and pitch black teeth and claws. Steelsong had metallic black scales with a steel grey sheen, steel grey horns and spinal crest, and black patagia that shone like steel. Proudwing had blue-black scales and gold patagia in between the bones of his wings; his horns and crest were gilded, his eyes molten gold. All of the snow around them had melted into glistening pools of water, some of which had sunk down into the shallow bed of soil.

Wynne snarled her fingers around the reins of her mule in a futile attempt to thaw the cold of her anxiety. Robb—whose lord father had forbidden him from doing precisely this—was putting not only himself but also her entire diplomatic mission in jeopardy. _There’s nothing I can do about it_, she thought. _What’s done is done. Now I have no choice but to plan for this contingency_.

Robb emerged from the castle with a grey amber-eyed direwolf pup at his heels. Aly and Jon each had a direwolf of their own; one black as pitch with golden eyes, the other ghostly white and red-eyed like a heart tree. Robb smiled at her, slow and easy. There was nothing malicious or even mocking in his expression, but it still made her seethe with impotent rage because now she had another thing to worry about. “My lady,” he said, “it took you longer to find us than I thought it would.”

Wynne plucked a thin blade from a sheath hidden inside her sleeve and threw it. Robb didn’t even have time to flinch until her throwing knife stopped in midair, the point hovering in front of his left eye. Wynne stayed astride her mule as her hazel eyes gleamed bright, arcane green behind her eyeglasses. “Let me get right to the point,” she deadpanned. “When I go beyond the Wall, I will be vulnerable to attack by the Others. Their powers dwindle significantly in the daylight, but they are still bigger and stronger and faster than any mere human. If things go wrong tomorrow, we won’t make it out alive. Their icicles won’t stop before they go through your eye.”

“Why do you think we came?” Aly retorted.

Jon nodded brusquely. “Fighting the Others with dragons is your master plan, remember?” he pointed out.

Wynne summoned the floating blade and slipped it back inside the sheath concealed in her sleeve as her husband came to help her dismount from her mule. Alas, while her accuracy with throwing knives hadn’t been altered much by her pregnancy, her ability to mount and dismount any steed without exacerbating the ache in the muscles of her back or the persistent twinge in her swollen ankles had been. Roose held her gaze and smirked at her as his gloved hands gripped her waist and he lowered her onto her feet; she tugged her bottom lip between her teeth before she inexorably smiled back.

_I love you so much_, she thought, _you incorrigible man_.

Then she banished the words back to the darkest corner of her mind where they belonged. If only the feeling was so easily suppressed. “Yes,” she huffed and shook her head at the sullen but shrewd boy and the girl who against all odds had become her friend in the five months that had passed since the harvest feast. “My plan was to fly with two dozen or more dragons who’ve been trained for battle years from now. Not to give the Others a chance to slay the only full-grown dragons we have and the one that was promised years before the second Long Night even begins.”

Maester Aemon had been moved to tears when she and the crow prince sang about a pair of doomed Valyrian lovers, but he was openly weeping now. Although he was blind, he heard the heavy footsteps of huge clawed feet and felt the smoky warmth of dragonbreath on his face as Proudwing bent to sniff him. “I have dreamed of dragons,” he whispered as Vermithora took flight and landed in a patch of catmint. At merely five feet long from nose to tail, the full-grown dragons all dwarfed her. “Each night I see their shadows on the snow and hear the crack of leathern wings. I see a bleeding star in the sky and feel their hot breath against my cheeks. My brothers dreamed of dragons, and those dreams were the death of them all.”

* * *

Aly had thought it was very strange to learn she had two half-siblings that she hadn’t met, but it was much stranger to meet one of them in the flesh.

When she learned that her true father was Rhaegar Targaryen, it had felt as though she finally knew the answers to questions she had been asking herself all her life. It explained almost everything, from her draconian aspect to why she was able to wake dragons out of stone. Most of the Stark children had inherited the Tully look, while Arya and Jon had Stark features and coloring. Amongst her siblings, Aly was the only child with the pale silver-gold hair and violet eyes associated with Old Valyria. It had made her feel out of place, even moreso than she knew Jon or Arya did. There was nothing of Old Valyria in her twin, from his brown hair and iron grey eyes to his dark skin with red undertones.

Their half-brother resembled her as Jon never had, though they had shared a womb. Aegon had the dark skin with the golden undertones of the Rhoynar, silver-gold hair, and deep indigo eyes all offset by his black woolen tunic and breeches; he wore thick wool and furs because finery sewn in fabric such as velvet or silk would not keep him as warm. There was a brooch in the shape of a red sun and black filigree spear pinned at his throat, the emblem of House Nymeros Martell wrought in the colors of House Targaryen fastening his pitch-black cloak. Bright torchlight danced over the aristocratic planes of his face, casting malleable shadows and illuminating his eyes as they sat on the floor in the great hall of the empty keep. Aegon bore a striking resemblance to her in his sharp cheekbones and delicate Valyrian features, though his disposition seemed much sunnier than hers even in the dark. Maester Aemon was still in the courtyard with the dragons. Robb was unloading the pack mules Lord Bolton had brought as Grey Wind gamboled around his feet, since the Leech Lord wasn’t going to allow his very pregnant lady and wife to sleep on any hard stone floors with aught but a spotted pink cloak for a blanket.

“Rhaenys’s coat of arms is the opposite,” Aegon said and smiled at her when he caught her staring at his sigil, “a three-headed red dragon on a field of orange. My father…_our_ father,” he said the word incredulously even though he didn’t look surprised to see them, “believed I was the one that was promised. Lady Bolton said you were.”

Aly swallowed hard. “I hatched Frostfyre, Steelsong, and Proudwing ten years ago,” she clarified, “from the clutch I found in the crypts beneath Winterfell. Wynne says I woke dragons out of stone and fulfilled one component of the prophecy.”

“Wynne also says that prophecies aren’t worth the paper they’re written on,” Jon muttered. “It could be you, or my sister, or your sister. Who knows? It could even be me.”

Aly smiled in spite of herself. Wynne had said as much during one of their conversations by candlelight: lighting their serpentine glass candles at the hour of the wolf and talking until they had run out of things to talk about or until the break of dawn. Whichever came first. Wynne had much to say about prognostication. Archmaester Marwyn, who had access to glass candles of his own, had put it less delicately. _Gorghan of Old Ghis wrote that a prophecy is like a treacherous woman_, he’d said,_ she takes your member in her mouth, and you moan with the pleasure of it and think how fine, how sweet, how good this is…and then her teeth bite into your flesh and your moans turn to screams. Gorghan once said that was the nature of prophecy. It will bite your prick off every time_.

In the flames, Aly and Jon met the greenseer who built the City of Beasts, the Old Man of Oldtown, Marwyn the Mage, a shadowbinder by the name of Quaithe, and the red priestess Melisandre. Wynne and Mayseline had cultivated a network of people who knew about the Others and were preparing for the War for the Dawn. Gathering dragonglass, hatching dragon eggs, forging magical weapons and forming alliances.

This diplomatic mission wasn’t just about making peace with the wildlings. It was about bringing Aemon and Aegon into the fold. Wynne hadn’t said as much, but Aly was smart enough to infer.

“I dreamed of you,” Aegon said, his expression taking on a distinct edge of vulnerability. “Maester Aemon dreamed of dragons, but…all I saw was you.”

Aly felt the lump of emotion that had clogged her throat come back with a vengeance. It was a snarling amalgamation of fear, discombobulation, hope, curiosity and connection. Aly felt connected to Aegon so viscerally that it was mindboggling.

It wasn’t the same connection she’d always had with Jon, or even with Robb. Jon was her twin, her other half, her loyal champion, the person she loved most in the world. Robb was her brother, her staunch defender, her brave fool, too fair and honorable for his own good. Aly knew them both so well because they were part of her, and she was part of them; they had sunk their roots into the same earth, and they all had the blood of Winterfell in their veins. Sable, Ghost, and Grey Wind were proof of that.

This connection with Aegon was something new, but it was still powerful. Aly knew instinctually that Jon felt it too, deep in the marrow of his bones.

“I’ve never dreamed of dragons either,” Jon said quietly, his dark grey eyes glinting like steel in the firelight. “I dream of darkness and cold and death, of the Others and their wights, of the Kings of Winter crawling from their graves. Wynne says my dreams are a map of where they are,” he glanced over his shoulder as Wynne hunched awkwardly in front of the hearth to warm her hands before he said, “that’s why I came.”

“Where did a noble girl like that learn how to build a fire?” Aegon wondered.

“I lived on the Isle of Faces for four years,” answered Wynne, “and I cooked my own breakfast every day. I grew my own potatoes and Lady Shella gave me hens to keep for eggs. I brought them home with me, but they’re all dead now since chickens live ten years at most and I got them over nine years ago. I did my own laundry, scrubbed my own pots and pans, wiped my own noble ass. I used my greensight to make investments—mostly in overseas trade, although I do have enough scruples to avoid profiting from slavery, no matter how lucrative—through my lady mother and earned a significant portion of the coin that will pay for the repairs to the castles on the Wall and to restore Moat Cailin.”

Aegon grinned at her knowingly. “Because overseas incomes cannot be taxed by the crown,” he said.

“Precisely.” Wynne adjusted her eyeglasses and nodded, a concise dip of her chin. “I wasn’t preparing for the War for the Dawn, though. I was still fooling myself into believing the Others weren’t my problem. I wanted to build a bank in Barrowton. It’s always been a dream of mine.”

Robb stopped in midstep. “You’re funding the restoration of Moat Cailin?” he asked.

“Not just me,” Wynne answered, “every northern lord and lady is contributing to the restoration of Moat Cailin and rebuilding the castle at Sea Dragon Point. Which you should already know, since your father is overseeing both efforts.”

Robb frowned at her. “I know about the rebuilding efforts,” he retorted, “but I don’t know who’s contributing what funds. That’s a job for our steward.”

It was obvious to Aly that Wynne thought Robb was shortsighted and stupid. Which made her gut twist, because that assumption wasn’t entirely wrong. Robb wasn’t stupid, but he often failed to see the forest through the trees. It was one of many traits he’d inherited from their father.

What you didn’t know could hurt you. Aly knew that better than most.

* * *

_I don’t think knowing where your money is going should be someone else’s job_, Wynne thought, _our king has put the crown over six million golden dragons in debt because he doesn’t care where his money is going. Lord Baelish can only peddle so much flesh and steal from so many shipments of coin before the coffers of the realm are emptied_.

Lord Baelish was Master of Coin and Master of Whispers, a petty lord who held two seats on the small council as only eight men in the history of the Seven Kingdoms had before him. Ser Ryam Redwyne, who served as Hand of the King and Lord Commander of the Kingsguard on the small council of Jaehaerys the Clever. Lord Lyonel Strong, who served as Hand of the King and Master of Laws on the small council of Viserys the Droll. Ser Criston Cole, the Kingmaker, who served as Hand of the King and Lord Commander of the Kingsguard on the small council of Aegon the Usurper. Lord Corlys Velaryon, who served as Hand of the Queen and Master of Ships on the small council of Queen Rhaenyra during the Dance of the Dragons. Munkun, who served as Grand Maester and briefly as Hand of the King on the small council of Aegon the Dragonbane before a new Hand was chosen at the Great Council of 136 AC. Lord Larys Strong, the Clubfoot, who served as Master of Whisperers and Lord Confessor on the small council of Viserys the Droll and on the small council of Aegon the Usurper. Ser Brynden Rivers, Lord Bloodraven, who served as Hand of the King and Master of Whisperers on the small council of Aerys the Schollar and on the small council of Maekar the Anvil. Lord Qarlton Chelsted, who served as Master of Coin and briefly as Hand of the King on the small council of Mad King Aerys. Lord Baelish was in charge of the Harbormaster, customs serjeants who assessed the value of cargo, and officers of the royal mint who oversaw the production and shipment of money. It was easy for someone in that position to defraud every kingdom whose coin was shipped from the port of King’s Landing and blame pirates from the Stepstones. Lord Baelish also profited from a network of brothels he owned, and from the illegal sex trade. While prostitution was legal in the Seven Kingdoms, selling underage boys and girls into sexual slavery was highly illegal. Alas, it was also highly lucrative.

Wynne had enough scruples to understand how wrong that was, even though she’d become desensitized to human cruelty after she retroactively experienced the history of the world in a waking nightmare. Nothing ever surprised her anymore, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t disappointed by the depths to which people could sink. Maybe that was somewhat hypocritical of her, considering the amoral man she had chosen to marry and her own capacity for violence. However, even someone as coldhearted as Roose didn’t seek to harm children or profit from their suffering. Which didn’t mean he would hesitate to do so, merely that he didn’t have any intention of hurting children with the games he played.

Roose had sent Domeric into fosterage after Bethany died because he feared that his influence would be the death of any goodness and kindness his son had inherited from his mother, and he left Ramsay with _his_ mother for exactly the same reason. Bolton lands were quiet and peaceful, despite the reputation that preceded the House who bore the flayed man on their banners. Roose believed the brutal means he used to achieve his peace and quiet were justified by his tranquil end. As though suffering wasn’t teeming below the surface of that oppressive calm. Roose didn’t care if his people were suffering as long as his peace remained undisturbed.

Wynne had done everything in her considerable power to mitigate the suffering of his people, once she maneuvered herself into a position to do so. Lord Baelish used his power to hurt people for profit. If she were forced to choose between her people and herself, she wouldn’t hesitate to choose herself. However, that selfishness could be turned into a weapon if you thought of all things as yours. My dreams. My family. My people. My land. My world. How dare anyone try to threaten those things, because they were _hers_.

“My lady.”

Roose had come up behind her and whispered in her ear while she was ruminating. When she felt the warmth of his body, she leaned back against his chest and smiled as his arms encircled her waist. Roose took her hands in his and she nestled her head under his chin, a shiver hissing out through her teeth and glistening down her spine at the sensation of his cold fingers intertwining with her warmer ones.

“My lord,” she whispered back as she brought his hands to her lips and blew hot breath over his knuckles in soft puffs of air. Roose squeezed her fingers and held her as the flames in the underground hearth effervesced in the darkness. In that evanescent moment of calm before the storm brewing on the horizon, Wynne closed her eyes and kept the coldest man in the Seven Kingdoms warm.


	29. Battle of the Haunted Forest {IV}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 2**  
Chapter 4: Battle of the Haunted Forest {IV}
> 
> Aly ruminates on her impending marriage to Stannis Baratheon.

**I have asked many idle**   
**questions since the day I could speak.**   
**Now I have many winters**   
**but very few answers.**

Kenneth Rexroth, “THE HEART’S GARDEN, THE GARDEN’S HEART”

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅩⅠⅠⅠ ❧**

298 AC

_At Queensgate, the castle once known as Snowgate, one of the sixteen abandoned castles along the Wall, east of Castle Black and west of Deep Lake_

* * *

Among the nobility of Westeros, marriages were arranged to strengthen blood ties and form lasting alliances between families. Or even kingdoms. Every old noble bloodline in the Seven Kingdoms had mingled at some point, with the notable exception of House Targaryen. It was known that dragons preferred to keep their illustrious bloodline pure, in accordance with the ancient incestuous customs they inherited from the dragonlords of Old Valyria. Aegon the Conqueror had married Queen Visenya out of duty and Queen Rhaenys out of desire.

It had occurred to Aly that in another life, she might have ended up married to Jon once they came of age. Then she threw up inside her mouth a little and choked back the bile that rose astringent into her throat. Or she might have married Aegon instead. Rhaegar had said the dragon must have three heads, so perhaps he wanted to wed both of his daughters to his eldest son. Aegon, Visenya, and Rhaenys come again.

However, the point was moot. Aly Snow had become Lady Alysanne Stark, and Lady Alysanne Stark was betrothed to Lord Stannis Baratheon.

It wasn’t unusual for older noblemen to marry younger noblewomen, especially if those noblemen had been widowed and left without male heirs. Jon Arryn was seven-and-forty years older than Lysa Tully, his third wife. Lord Bolton—Aly couldn’t quite bring herself to call him Roose—was married twice before Wynne.

Stannis had been wed to Lady Selyse Florent, the only daughter of Ser Ryam Florent of Brightwater Keep and Lady Prunella Peake of Starpike, when he was two-and-twenty and she was nineteen. It was a political match, one made because the Reach had supported House Targaryen during the rebellion. There were no eligible Tyrells and Robert had married Cersei Lannister, the Light of the West and only daughter of Tywin Lannister, the Great Lion, Lord of Casterly Rock, Warden of the West, and Shield of Lannisport. It fell to Stannis to strengthen the political ties between the Reach and House Baratheon in the aftermath of the war his brother won. Stannis was heir to the Iron Throne until Prince Joffrey was born a year after Robert was crowned and being a member of the royal family still made him a hot commodity. Not as hot a commodity as his younger and more charismatic brother Renly, Lord of Storm’s End and the Lord Paramount of the Stormlands, however. There was purportedly bad blood between them all because Robert gave Storm’s End to Renly instead of Stannis. Despite this, Stannis had served his older brother well on the small council for seventeen years. It was their grandmother Princess Rhaelle who ruled the Stormlands as the Lady of Storm’s End. Renly had left his castle to his grandmother and Ser Cortnay Penrose, the castellan, while the other storm lords fended for themselves as they had ever since Lord Steffon and Lady Cassana perished in a shipwreck.

Lady Selyse had given Stannis a daughter less than a year after they wed, Shireen, who almost died of greyscale while still in the cradle. Shireen was eleven, of age with Arya. Lady Selyse died in childbed six years ago, when her daughter was five years old. While most believed the Lady of Dragonstone had died of childbed fever, there were rumors that she hanged herself when she learned her son had died before he took his first breath.

It was said he took no joy in the marriage bed. Stannis went to perform his duty in the bedchamber as though he were marching to war. It was also said that he was bedding the bewitching red priestess who arrived on Dragonstone a decade ago.

Aly knew the truth of that because she’d confronted the mysterious red woman by candlelight. Melisandre had told her that Selyse believed her union with Stannis was cursed because Robert had deflowered her cousin Lady Delena on their wedding night, in their marriage bed. Robert and Delena had a son named Edric Storm, the only acknowledged bastard sired by the king. Selyse believed the defilement of her cousin had cast a shadow upon her womb, a curse she hoped the Lord of Light could break.

Stannis became disillusioned with the red god and his priestess after his son was stillborn. Whatever he once had with Melisandre was over, a fire doused by his lack of faith.

Aly rose to her feet and went to stand in front of the hearth, peeling her fur-lined gloves over her fingers and tucking each one inside the leather bag slung over her shoulder before she let the warmth of the fire seep into her hands. Sable, the direwolf pup with amber eyes and black fur Robb had found guarding the runt of the litter, affectionately nipped Ghost before she padded over to where Aly stood.

Roose caught her peering at him and his wife out of the corner of her eye and smirked. “My lady,” he said, his deep voice courteous but devoid of the warmth and possessiveness she heard when he addressed Wynne as such. Although it was still quite strange to hear a lord address _her _as such, after sixteen years of being known as only a bastard. “You require something from us.” This was phrased as more of a statement than a question.

Aly took a deep breath and girded her loins. Figuratively, since all of her girdles had remained in her wardrobe at Winterfell. Instead of a gown she wore a fur cloak, a wool tunic, fleece-lined wool breeches, thick wool stockings and boots. “I need to talk to Wynne,” she mumbled. “Alone.”

Wynne extricated herself from the uncharacteristic warmth of Roose and put her mittens back on; they were made of wolverine fur, the better to repel snow and frost with, and lined in soft white rabbit fur, the better to prevent frostbite. “Fair warning,” she murmured as they swept down the torchlit hall to the room where Robb had left the featherbed with its pile of blankets and furs. “Once I sit down, I am not getting back up. When you’re pregnant, your ankles swell to absurd proportions and carrying two children everywhere makes your back ache. However, you don’t want to discuss the minutiae of being pregnant…” she unceremoniously flopped onto the featherbed and said, “…you want to discuss your betrothed.”

Aly nodded hesitantly, feeling somewhat abashed by the acknowledgement of her betrothal. It still felt surreal that she had any marriage prospects at all. Those were for trueborn daughters, not bastard-born girls. Although the unmitigatedly galled look on Lady Catelyn’s face the first time someone had addressed _her_ as “Lady Stark” made everything seem worthwhile. Maybe it was petty of her, but that woman had made her life a living hell for as long as she could remember. Aly didn’t know if she could ever forgive that.

In the months since Aly learned the facts of her true parentage—that her parents were married and that her father was a Targaryen prince—she hadn’t quite stopped thinking of herself as a bastard. _I know how to be a bastard_, she thought, _I don’t know how to be a highborn lady. Or a princess. Or a wife. Or_… she watched Wynne wrap one of the furs around her shoulders and drag the other blankets over her gravid belly, …_a mother. I don’t even know who I am anymore_.

* * *

Wynne had seen enough of the future that she no longer believed in fate, if she ever had. Some forthcoming events were inevitable, but eventuality and destiny weren’t the same thing. Whatever couldn’t be avoided was typically caused by humans being set in their ways, not by gods or monsters.

It was still one hell of a coincidence that Aly—a long-lost dragon princess—was betrothed to the Lord of Dragonstone, the island that had been the ancestral seat of House Targaryen before the Conquest.

Wynne muffed a yawn as she nestled into the snarl of blankets and furs. Sable sniffed at one corner of the featherbed before she began to spin in circles and curled up with her snout propped upon her forepaws. Wynne arranged the hood of her cloak behind her head and tried not to shiver as the chill encroached on her despite the fire burning in the hearth. “So,” she said, “you want to know everything that I know about Lord Stannis.”

Aly nodded and stopped towering over her when she crouched and swept the woolen hem of her cloak beneath her in one smooth movement before shucking the strap of her bag and sitting on the floor with her legs crossed. There was no need for them to stand on ceremony here at the edge of the world. “When you married Lord Bolton, you knew all of his secrets,” she pointed out. “I cannot reject a royal decree, but I can ask you what kind of man I’m marrying.”

This was true. Aly wasn’t in exactly the same position she herself was in before she married Roose, but she was keeping perilous secrets in order to survive and that meant she needed to know what sort of man she was marrying. Wynne couldn’t begrudge her that, especially because she of all people understood such precaution. “Stannis Baratheon is a stubborn, harsh, prideful, and unforgiving man,” she said without bothering to blunt the sharpness of her tongue. Aly knew her well enough by now that she didn’t have to demure. “He’s going to assume that his betrothal to you is a slight because in his eyes, you’re a bastard. He holds grudges more tightly than my lady mother. He grinds his teeth at the slightest provocation. He also possesses a terrifyingly strong sense of justice and duty. He’s honorable and honest to a fault. He doesn’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. When men under his command raped during Robert’s Rebellion, Stannis had those men gelded and made an example of them. He won’t be unfaithful to you or use violence to discipline you. He knighted a man born in Flea Bottom and gave him a keep and over a thousand acres of land on Cape Wrath because that man saved his life during the siege of Storm’s End. He desperately wants a son.”

It was a shame that Aly didn’t have a manipulative bone in her body. Stannis would be frighteningly susceptible to the right sort of emotional manipulation; his affair with Melisandre was proof of that. Robert and Renly were incompetent by comparison, but they were both charismatic and beloved in a way Stannis wasn’t. Neither his lords bannermen nor his smallfolk had ever loved him because he was overshadowed by his brothers, and he was starved for affection like a tree struggling for sunlight in spite of the shade. If Aly offered him what he craved, Stannis would love her with an iron ferocity that would never break nor bend.

Wynne couldn’t tell her so, however. Elsewise, the affection wouldn’t be genuine, and that simply would not do. Stannis was nothing like Roose; he didn’t play games. It was anathema to him. Roose had understood that Wynne accepted his proposal in order to survive, just as she understood that he had feigned affection from the beginning in order to manipulate her into choosing him. They both knew what kind of person the other was before he took her as his wife. Aly deserved to know what sort of man Stannis was even though he couldn’t know the whole truth about her. It wasn’t fair, but that was nothing new.

“What’s it like, being married?” Aly wondered, her husky voice paradoxically wistful and fearful.

Wynne sucked the inside of her cheek in between her teeth and gnawed reflexively before she answered. “I cannot speak for every wife in the world,” she murmured, “but I love being married. Roose is passionate in our bedchamber and dispassionate in every other context. Although we disagree—something that is inevitable in every relationship since no two people can possibly agree on everything—we never fight. Roose is more than just my husband. He’s my ally, my shield and sword, my knife in the shadows. Roose wouldn’t die for me, but he _would_ kill for me. I have never felt safer than I feel in his castle,” she chewed on her lip and a knot of emotion coalesced in her throat as she divulged, “in his arms. When I speak, he listens. When I offer my opinion, he values my input and makes decisions with my preferences in mind. When I wake screaming from the nightmares all greenseers are cursed with, he holds me until I fall into deep and dreamless sleep.”

It was rare for greenseers to sleep without dreaming of either the past or the future, the former more often than the latter. Ellara had been her bedmaid for years, but she had never once slept dreamlessly beside her friend. Wynne should have known she was doomed to fall in love the first time she woke up beside Roose with no memory of her dreams from the night before. “Some arranged marriages are unhappy,” she clarified, “but those marriages are typically arranged by other people. Roose and I wrote our contracts together, while discussing each clause. Neither you nor Stannis has a choice in this, but that doesn’t mean you can’t discuss what you want from each other before you’re wedded and bedded. Since you’re a bastard in his eyes, you’ll be able to speak your mind in ways most ladies wouldn’t.”

Aly scoffed, the exhalation tinged with incredulous laughter. “Don’t you _always_ speak your mind?” she asked.

“I was raised by a widowed mother,” Wynne said primly. “It’s not unexpected that I speak out of turn, because I never had a father to teach me how to hold my tongue. Alas,” she adjusted her eyeglasses with her knuckles because her fingers were obscured by the thick fur of her mittens, “you do not have the same excuse.”

Aly snorted, her laughter full-bodied and spilling from her throat as her lips parted in a grin timorous enough to match the chaotic trembling of her shoulders. Eddard Stark was her father in almost every way that mattered; and even though he had lied to her and her twin about everything, he wasn’t a bad father. “I never had a mother,” she pointed out.

“No,” Wynne deadpanned, “you only had Lady Stark. What I have is a mother who cannot look at me without seeing the ghost of my father in my face.”

There was nothing masculine about her face whatsoever, but still Aly understood her meaning. Cregard and Uncle Brandon looked so alike it was uncanny while Mel resembled their grandmother Lyarra and Lyanna even moreso than Aly, the she-wolf’s daughter. Wynne had grown up with the ghost of her father haunting Barrow Hall before she opened her third eye. Aly could not see the shades of the past, but she was smart enough to see that everyone was haunted. It was a symptom of memory, of survival.

Frostfyre peered at them through the windowpane, one silver eye gleaming on the other side of the glass; the pane was smudged with centuries of windblown dust and grime whilst the narrow window itself was shaped like a claw, the edges arcing from the bottom corners into the point at its apex.

Aly felt the knot in her chest loosen, though it didn’t quite come untied.

“A gloom with a view,” Wynne deadpanned, her smile a wry twist of her lips before it withered. “Do you understand the risk you’re taking?” she asked. “Jon is a Stark through and through, but you’re the spitting image of your grandmother. Most of the knights at Castle Black were men-at-arms at the Red Keep and they remember Queen Rhaella, but even if they didn’t, seeing you and Jon on dragonback will leave no doubt in their minds about your parentage. Not to mention the hundreds of rapers at Castle Black and thousands more beyond the Wall.”

Aly felt the knot in her chest grow taut with dread. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t thought of that, but she had thought she would be safe because she and her brothers would protect each other and if they hadn’t come on dragonback they wouldn’t have been able to reach the Wall before the Bolton contingent arrived. “Daynes were dragonriders,” she argued, since everyone who saw her assumed the Lady Ashara had been her mother.

“Yes,” Wynne retorted, “the Daynes rode dragons nine thousand years ago. However, only my memory goes back that far. All the Daynes have are some dragonbone relics and innate fire magic that no one of their line has tapped into since before the Coming of the Andals.”

“Jon thought we might spread a rumor that our mother was a dragonseed,” Aly suggested, “a bastard daughter of Mad King Aerys.”

“Yes,” Wynne echoed, “he had enough affairs during the first decade of his reign for that to seem plausible. However, I am reluctant to spread a rumor that may weaken your future husband’s claim to the Iron Throne.”

Aly narrowed her eyes at that as comprehension dawned. “King Robert is going to die,” she deduced.

Wynne nodded sharply. “I believe he will be assassinated by the queen within the year,” she clarified. “Not that I blame her, but I cannot allow Prince Joffrey to rule. When he was a boy, he amused himself by killing small animals. Now that he’s come of age, he tortures and murders prostitutes with impunity. It may seem hypocritical of me to judge him considering who my husband is, but I wouldn’t allow my lord of Bolton to rule the Seven Kingdoms either.”

Which told Aly that the Leech Lord had earned the gruesome reputation that preceded the flayed man on his banners. “Lord Stannis is the rightful heir to the Iron Throne,” she murmured, “as the prince who sired me was before him. Am I to become a pawn in the game you’re playing?”

Wynne arched her eyebrows and shook her head. “Not a pawn,” she retorted, “a queen. If Princess Rhaenys doesn’t poison the crown prince after they consummate their marriage and claim the Iron Throne for herself. There are many ways to skin a cat. Or a lion.”

Aly swallowed hard. _What if I don’t want to be a queen? _she thought, but didn’t ask. Something told her that she wouldn’t like the answer.


	30. Battle of the Haunted Forest {V}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 2**  
Chapter 5: Battle of the Haunted Forest {V}
> 
> Roose courteously requests the presence of the Lady of Darkdell whilst Jon ruminates on his new station. Once she arrives, introductions are made.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alcmaeon was a natural philosopher and medical theorist from the fifth century BCE who pioneered anatomical dissection and was the first person to identify the pharyngotympanic tube (a tube connecting the nasopharynx to the middle ear). In his book _On Nature_, he suggested that health was a state of equilibrium between opposing humors of the body. This was later developed into the medical theory of humorism, upon which the concept of bloodletting was based. According to Alcamaeon, “equality of the powers maintains health but monarchy among them produces disease.” Galen was a Greek physician, surgeon, and philosopher from the first century CE who created and popularized the doctrine of the four temperaments. Hippocrates created the model of the four humors developed further by Galen.
> 
> Pythagoras theorized the Harmony of the Spheres in the sixth century BCE. Boethius, a Roman philosopher who lived in the sixth century CE, presented three branches of music: musica universalis (the music of celestial bodies), musica humana (the music of human bodies), and musica quae in quibusdam constituta est instrumentis (the music of singers and musical instruments).
> 
> Quotes are paraphrased from _The Prince_ (1532) by Niccolò Machiavelli.
> 
> @ropaola, here is more Willas and Mayseline. Not a spinoff, but still.

**Wisdom consists of knowing how to distinguish the nature of trouble, and in choosing the lesser evil.**

Niccolò Machiavelli, _The Prince_

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅩⅠⅤ ❧**

298 AC

_At Queensgate, the castle once known as Snowgate, one of the sixteen abandoned castles along the Wall, east of Castle Black and west of Deep Lake_

* * *

Roose had begun consulting the alchemical texts collected and occasionally written by his forebears after he began courting Wynne. Although he already possessed extensive knowledge of humorism, a concept upon which the practice of bloodletting was founded. It was first theorized by Archmaester Alcamaeon and expanded upon by Archmaester Galen, whose doctrine of the four temperaments was an interpretation of dyscrasia: an imbalance of the four humors in which the cause of all diseases was rooted.

Human bodies contained blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Sharpness and intelligence were the result of yellow bile in the soul, whilst bad blood resulted in stupidity and ignorance. Unfortunately, an excess of yellow bile in the body resulted in aggression and imbalance. One of his ancestors had written that blood was a mixture of the four elements: air, water, fire, and earth. If magic was in the blood, her theory made perfect sense.

Roose had been surprised to learn that blood corresponded with air, not water or even fire. Instead phlegm corresponded with water, yellow bile with fire, and black bile with earth. Each of the four elements symbolized opposing dialectical forces: fire and water were order and chaos, whilst earth and air were emotional thought and rational behavior.

Those four elements also symbolized the four stages of alchemy. Putrefaction corresponded with the phlegmatic temperament and the element of water. At this stage, all ingredients were calcinated into black matter. Purification corresponded with the melancholic temperament and the element of earth. At this stage, all impurities were removed from the alchemical mixture. Transmutation corresponded with the choleric temperament and the element of fire. At this stage, one thing was transformed into another. Projection corresponded with the sanguine temperament and the element of air. At this stage, a successful mixture was concocted.

Roose had seen Wynne turn lead into bright gold, watched her catch lightning in a bottle and purify tainted water, and heard her speak through a raven’s beak. Although he had magic in his bloodline, he was never passionate about studying the higher mysteries. Roose bathed in blood when he accumulated enough prisoners to fill a tub, but that had been the extent of his dabbling.

Until he saw the inhuman monsters lurking beyond the Wall.

Roose knew the best way to fight them was magic. Valyrian steel was forged with magic. Dragons were magic. Wynne embodied the primordial magic of the forest, of the fertile earth from which all things grew and to which all things returned.

It was also the best way to level the playing field, in the event that Wynne ever turned against him. Roose didn’t think she would, but he couldn’t assume that she wouldn’t. It would be unwise to underestimate her.

“Lord Bolton.” Robb had come to stand before the hearth. Although he was only a boy of sixteen, the heir to Winterfell stood as tall as Roose and he was broader in the shoulders. Ser Brynden Tully, the Blackfish, had a similar build.

Roose turned and looked at the young wolf. “This was a stupid mistake you made,” he said without inflection or preamble. “Wynne and I are here to declare war. These negotiations may have saved the wildlings from being massacred by the Others, but going beyond the Wall is a decisive act of war against our true enemy. Wynne is risking her own life and the lives of our unborn sons to keep the wildlings and the men of the Night’s Watch from slaughtering each other, and you are a complication that my lady does not need.”

Robb bristled with his wounded pride before he set his jaw stubbornly in a futile attempt to conceal his fear. “Mance Rayder has my uncle,” he said. “I could not stay behind the walls of Winterfell and do nothing.”

Roose sighed. _Arrogant boy_, he thought. “What can you do for your uncle?” he asked, genuinely curious. “I’m sure you’ve trained at arms, but you’ve never squired or participated in tourneys. Not that a joust or a melee is anything like actually being on the battlefield, but it might have given you a semblance of combat experience. I know Ser Rodrik Cassel, and I doubt he’s let you use live steel. Only wooden swords for a boy such as yourself.”

That made Robb flush, abashed. “I’ve studied polemology,” he said, “I know my history and tactics.”

Roose cocked his head in concession. All lordlings studied the art of war, since one of their lordly duties was to serve the crown if called upon during wartime. “Do you think you know more of history than a greenseer, or more of polemology than a lord seasoned in battle?” he asked, his voice soft.

“No.” Robb shook his head slowly, the flush in his cheeks seeping into his ears and neck.

Roose indulged a fantasy of flaying him in the icebound bowels of this castle, where not a soul would hear him scream. _Benjen Stark is a valuable hostage as both the blood of Winterfell and First Ranger of the Night’s Watch_, he thought, _but Robb Stark is the heir to Winterfell and that would make him more valuable still. Mance Rayder is smart enough to understand that_. “I am your father’s bannerman,” he said, “and that means you are now my responsibility until you return home to Winterfell. However,” he warned, “I care not whether you live or die. I care about my wife and my unborn sons. If your presence here puts them in danger, I will not protect you from suffering the consequences of your actions.”

“I’m a man grown,” said Robb. “I can protect myself.”

Roose quirked his dark eyebrows, his eyes widening incredulously. “As you say,” he murmured. Since he knew better than to intrude on Wynne in the midst of a private conversation, he lit a glass candle. It burned hot, the unpleasantly bright fire casting incandescent shadows and illuminating the colors in the room until reds turned into flame and whites shone like fresh snow on cold summer mornings.

Willas Tyrell looked back at him through the fire, his amber eyes gilded in the candlelight beneath arched dark brows as the magic of the glass candle made it seem as though Roose was standing in his solar even though he was still in the great hall at Queensgate. At seven-and-twenty, the heir to Highgarden was a tall and spindly man with a hawkish nose and an angular face, his long curls barely contained by a niello clip shaped like a rose in full bloom. Willas sat behind a polished oak desk festooned with alchemical manuscripts and tomes, glass bottles and jars of arcane ingredients, hawk feather quills and inkwells. There was a shrewdness about him despite his mild and gentle disposition, a keen intelligence like the sharp thorns lurking under the bloom of the rose. Willas had cultivated a reputation for being rather pious and quite boring in order to pursue his passions unfettered by the ladies of the court at Highgarden: breeding hounds and hawks and horses, stargazing, and reading books. Particularly arcane texts and manuscripts, because Willas Tyrell was a powerful mage. Beside his chair were a pair of dogs, a sleek two-hundred-pound black warhound bred to hunt wolves and drag horsemen from their saddles on the battlefield and a pudgy fawn and white herding dog; the warhound sat alert, back straight and ears forward while the herding dog sprawled at his master’s feet without a care in the world, its tongue lolling out of its mouth. On his shoulder perched a juvenile goshawk with brown and white plumage, its golden eyes darkening to red until they flickered eldritch white so Roose knew Mayseline was listening. “Lord Bolton,” he greeted.

Roose acknowledged him with a cordial nod. “Lord Willas,” he said courteously. “Wynne requests the presence of your lady wife at the hour of the dragon.”

* * *

_There are no monsters here_, Old Nan had told him when he was a boy, _the monsters live beyond the Wall_.

Old Nan’s monsters were ghouls and giants, wights and stalking white shadows. Wynne had told him that ghouls were not indigenous to Westeros, but to Essos, and they preferred rotting flesh to fresh meat. Grumkins had gone extinct thousands of years ago, but snarks and giant ice spiders hadn’t. It was strange to be in the presence of someone who knew which monsters were real…and which legends were true.

It was even stranger that he was no longer Jon Snow. Now he was Jon Stark, Lord of Sea Dragon Point. Only a lesser lord of ruins, bogs, hills, and pine forests, but a lord nonetheless.

Sea Dragon Point was a peninsula from which much of the timber used for shipbuilding was harvested and sent throughout the Seven Kingdoms, where razor clams were dug on the shore, where otters and whales and grey seals were hunted for pelts and meat and blubber. Wynne had sent him trade agreements between Sea Dragon Point and Barrowton to study, because he would have to reapprove them. Many of his people would come to Barrowton or the Winter Town to sell their wares: otter pelts, whale oil, and sealskin. While the Winter Town was a center of northern trade during the winter for which it was named, Barrowton was an epicenter of trade where southron merchants flocked in the spring and summer and autumn and White Harbor—the only port city in the North—was a hub of trade no matter the season. Once the ruins were rebuilt, he would have a holdfast and incomes of his own and he would be a Stark bannerman. There were rivers brimming with salmon and lakes that had gleamed in the moonlight when they flew over them on dragonback.

It was a thinly populated land of fishwives and fishermen who flensed whales and bred otters to chase the fish in the lakes and rivers into their nets, and he was their lord. How strange.

Jon had dreamt of being Lord of Winterfell, even though he felt a deep sense of guilt for having such dreams. It felt as though he was dreaming of usurping Robb, stealing his birthright, becoming the sort of bastard Lady Catelyn had always believed he was. Now he was a lord in truth, and he felt the weight of that settle over him like a cloak of lead.

Maester Aemon came in from the cold winds and he propped his blackthorn cane against the stone wall before Aegon helped him to sit beside Jon, his clouded eyes fixed upon him. “I hear you have been made a lord,” he said, his voice soft and solemn, “you, the boy who should have been a prince.”

Jon felt a lump forming in his throat, his chest gone tight with every breath he took. “I have,” he said.

“Allow me to give you the same counsel I once gave my brother Aegon,” said Aemon. “before we parted for the last time. Egg was three-and-thirty when the Great Council chose him to mount the Iron Throne. Though he was a man grown with sons of his own, in some ways he was still a boy. Egg had an innocence to him, a sweetness we all loved. Kill the boy within you, I told him the day I took ship for the Wall. It takes a man to rule, to have the strength to do what must be done. Kill the boy, Jon. Winter is coming, and we tremble on the cusp of wonders and terrors no man could hope to comprehend. Kill the boy and let the man be born.”

* * *

There were seven universal principles, separated into two divisions of study.

Firstly, the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Grammar, as the mechanics of language, was meant to define perception of information and objects in order to create symbols and words that expressed thought. Logic, or dialectic, was a process of critical thinking, of eliminating contradictions to produce only factual knowledge. Rhetoric was at its core the transmission of language and knowledge from one person to another, rooted in the desire not only to know but also to understand and be understood.

Secondly, the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Each was a study of either quantities or magnitudes. Arithmetic studied quantities as such. Geometry studied magnitudes at rest. Astronomy studied the inherent movements of magnitudes. Music studied the connections between quantities.

Ancient philosophers who studied these universal principles believed the world sang. Not in the form of music, but in proportions and movements of celestial bodies. Harmony of the spheres produced a metaphysical song.

This music of the spheres was magic: intangible and inaudible, but still cosmic and powerful. Wynne did not hear the song of the earth so much as she felt it deep within her chest, discordant with her own heartbeat. It was a constant whisper, one that begged to become a scream. Which made her want to sing in the True Tongue, but when she did that plants overgrew and things made of wood tended to forget they weren’t trees any longer. It wasn’t something that she could have ever done in Barrowton, where almost everything was made of wood.

At the edge of the world, she felt the magic embedded in the towering wall of ice. _When the Children of the Forest sang their spells into the Wall_, she thought, _they made them heliophilous. Those spells need sunlight to sustain themselves. Once the Long Night begins again, the Wall is going to break. No matter what happens tomorrow_.

“So this is where you’re hiding,” a voice she knew by heart said as the door creaked open. Fortunately, the keep was much too insulated for such a thing to invite more of a chill inside.

At that, Wynne extricated herself from her woolgathering and smiled. “Maysie,” she greeted.

Mayseline had given her lord husband three children since last Wynne had seen her: triplets named Harlen, after the first Lord Paramount of the Mander, Vymond, after her grandfather, and Lexine, after Willas’s great-grandmother. Wynne didn’t envy her such a fruitful pregnancy. If carrying twins was exhausting, triplets would be even moreso. Since preterm labor was more likely with multiples, the Lady of Darkdell had been confined to her chambers at Highgarden for almost four moons. Vaegon Flowers, her natural cousin and eldest adoptive brother, was castellan of Darkdell and he had grown accustomed to ruling the City of Beasts in her absence. Ser Vesper, his younger twin brother, had sworn his sword and shield to Mayseline after he earned his spurs. Wynne had often spoken with her in the greenscape, but somehow that wasn’t the same as seeing her friend in the flesh. Something deep in the marrow of her bones knew Mayseline, and quiet affection bloomed wild and warm in her chest the sight of her fellow greenseer. Aly seemed a bit overwhelmed by the sight of another greenseer in the flesh, but it took her only a moment to shake it off before she grew accustomed to the eldritchness that clung to the Lady of Darkdell like a second skin.

“Are they kicking?” Mayseline asked.

Wynne had unconsciously splayed the fingers of her left hand over her belly. “One of them is,” she answered, “some nights he kicks so much I can’t sleep. We’ve named him Rogar, his brother Avery.”

“Which defeats the purpose of a nameday,” Aly interjected from where she still sat on the floor in the slant of light cast by the fire burning in the hearth.

Wynne huffed as Mayseline crouched gracefully and offered a hand to Sable, who sniffed her fingertips before the direwolf permitted the greenseer to cosset her. “Maester Uthor will still record the names my husband and I have bestowed upon them when they’re born,” she pointed out primly, “giving our sons names before that day comes defeats no purpose. In fact, it serves the purpose of allowing their mother to refer to them as something other than the Rambunctious One and the Reticent One.” Then she tilted her head and looked at Mayseline with her eyes narrowed behind her eyeglasses. “I have to get up, don’t I?” she asked, her voice tinged with recalcitrance.

“Yes.” Mayseline nodded succinctly as she rose to her feet and held out both hands imperiously, curling her fingers and crooking them slowly into a beckoning. “Yes, you do. I am not doing this without you.”

Wynne heaved a sigh as she hooked her small fingers around her longer ones and let her friend haul her up out of her nest of warm blankets and furs. Underneath the rabbit fur-lined leather gloves Mayseline wore, archery calluses lurked on her fingertips. Wynne stepped into her doeskin slippers and opened the cracked door without touching it, her eyes glowing a verdant green as the hinges creaked.

“You’re doing small magic without gesturing now,” Mayseline observed as they swept down the hallway. There was a pinch of approval in her mellifluous voice, because she wasn’t shy about her magic and while she understood why Wynne had kept her magic hidden for so long, she never once approved of her decision to do so.

Wynne cocked her head and shrugged. “I only gesticulate so people will assume I need to use my hands to use magic,” she explained.

“‘Never attempt to win by force what can be won through deception,’” Aly quoted.

Wynne hummed in agreement. “‘All courses of action are risky,’” she quoted back, “‘so prudence is not in avoiding danger but in calculating risks and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition, not mistakes of apathy.’”

“‘Develop the strength to act,’” Mayseline quoted as they entered the great hall, “‘not only the strength to suffer.’”

Ser Vesper and his paramour Ser Ellery Hightower had accompanied Mayseline through the trees because she could not carry the dragon eggs by herself, especially after she found two more clutches laid in the aftermath of the Dance of the Dragons: seven laid by Silverwing at Red Lake, six laid by Sheepstealer in the Mountains of the Moon. All five-and-twenty of the unhatched eggs had been set on the floor to form a spiral of unhatched dragonlings, and someone had lit the candle stubs in the chandelier so the room was brighter than it had been with only the fire burning in the hearth. Ser Ellery was a skinchanger with an affinity for dormice. There was a hazel dormouse perched on his right shoulder, its paws clinging to the fabric of his doublet. Vermithora was eyeing the poor thing like she wanted roasted mouse for dinner.

Vesper had grey eyes like Mayseline, but otherwise they looked nothing alike. House Vyrwel was essentially an unofficial cadet branch of House Targaryen, and Vesper had Valyrian looks that reflected his ancestry: he was tall and sinewy with a face that held a fearful symmetry, pale unblemished skin, and silver-gold hair tied back in a long braid. At three-and-twenty, he and his twin brother were three years older than Mayseline. Vesper wore a black fur cloak over a quilted black doublet with the wyvern of House Vyrwel stitched upon the breast in silver metallic thread, black woolen breeches and leather boots. If not for the sigil he bore, he might’ve been mistaken for a man of the Night’s Watch. From the leather belt around his waist hung a bastard sword and a dagger with a dragonbone hilt.

Ser Ellery had black hair, amber eyes, and freckled golden brown skin; his face was angular, his nose hawkish, his dark eyebrows thin and prominently arched. There was a slender rapier with an ornate hilt sheathed at his left hip, ostensibly for a right-handed crossdraw. It was a double-edged sword used for dueling and fencing; the blade wickedly sharp.

Mayseline stopped in front of the eggs and flicked her gaze around the great hall. “For those who do not know me,” she began, “I am Mayseline of House Vyrwel and House Tyrell, Lady Regnant of Darkdell, Bride of Trees, wife of Willas Tyrell, Lord of Darkdell and heir to Highgarden. I have brought my natural cousin, Ser Vesper Flowers,” she gestured to Vesper with a flourish, “and my good-cousin, Ser Ellery of House Hightower, because I could not be expected to carry so many dragon eggs myself. Wynne has been my friend since I was ten and she was eight, and we are both greenseers. I hatched a dragon named Antimony a year ago.”

“I am a skinchanger,” said Ser Ellery, “and I have a drop of dragon blood, though not enough to hatch an egg. My father is Ser Baelor of House Hightower, heir to the Hightower. Otherwise known as Baelor Brightsmile. My mother is Lady Rhonda of House Rowan, younger sister of the Lord of Goldengrove. I am the second of their sons.”

“Alas,” Ser Vesper deadpanned, “I am only a knight, with no magical power whatsoever. My father was Lord Maelor of House Vyrwel. My mother was Lady Oribel of House Bridges. My twin brother Vaegon and I each hatched a dragon two moonturns ago.”

“I am Wynne of House Dustin and House Bolton,” Wynne said, “Lady of the Dreadfort, heir to Barrowton and Harrenhal, and Bride of Trees. Which, if you’re wondering, is the honorary title bestowed upon greenseers by the Children of the Forest. I hatched Vermithora,” she glanced at her dragon as the little beast sat by the eggs and sniffed one curiously whilst the direwolves crept to cluster around her, “six moonturns ago.”

“Roose of House Bolton,” Roose said, his quiet deep voice barely above a whisper, “Lord of the Dreadfort and Warden of the Weeping Water. I am here because my lovely wife is here, and because I have no intention of allowing the white walkers and their wights to take the North.”

Wynne bit her lip to stifle a smile at that as her pulse spiked and Rogar kicked even harder than before; Avery kicked too, not for the first time. It was a strange disharmony.

“Robb of the House Stark,” Robb introduced himself in his most formal tone and said, “the heir to Winterfell. My father is Eddard of the House Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North. My mother is Catelyn of the House Tully and House Stark, Lady of Winterfell. I am here because the wildlings have taken my uncle hostage. I mean to bring him home. I am a warg. My direwolf is Grey Wind.”

“I am Lady Alysanne of the House Stark,” Aly said. “I hatched Frostfyre, Steelsong, and Proudwing eleven years ago. I am also a skinchanger. My direwolf is Sable.”

“Jon of the House Stark,” said Jon, “I am Lord of Sea Dragon Point, though I have no castle or holdfast yet. I am a warg as well. My direwolf is Ghost, and Steelsong has chosen me to be his rider.”

“I am Aemon of House Targaryen,” the blind man said, “Maester at Castle Black and a man of the Night’s Watch. My father was King Maekar of House Targaryen, First of His Name. Otherwise known as Maekar the Anvil. My mother was Lady Dyanna of House Dayne, who died twelve years before her husband was crowned.”

“Aegon of House Targaryen,” Aegon said, “a steward of the Night’s Watch. My father was Prince Rhaegar of House Targaryen. My mother was Princess Elia of House Nymeros Martell. My brothers call me the Crow Prince. I am here to hatch a dragon.”


	31. Battle of the Haunted Forest {VI}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 2**  
Chapter 6: Battle of the Haunted Forest {VI}
> 
> Wynne overthinks about potential dragonriders and Roose has an epiphany about his feelings. Meanwhile, the crow prince hatches a dragon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **WARNING**: HERE THERE BE SMUT, preceded by approximately 3,000 words of plot because I am incorrigible.
> 
> Viserys died in this version of the story in 289 AC, a year before Arianne canonically found the half-written letter in which her father wrote to Quentyn that he would rule Dorne someday. Doran might’ve told her about the marriage pact in the aftermath, since the point was moot. Arianne wouldn’t have misunderstood his intentions either way (especially in regards to her undesirable suitors), and therefore wouldn’t have believed he hated her.

**Now I’m undressing with my winter teeth.**

Caitlin Scarano, “What You Killed, What You Thought”

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅩⅤ ❧**

298 AC

_At Queensgate, the castle once known as Snowgate, one of the sixteen abandoned castles along the Wall, east of Castle Black and west of Deep Lake_

* * *

At the hour of the wolf, another dragon was hatched.

Wynne positioned herself with her back against the wall out of habit. With the bulwark of stone behind her, anyone or anything that might hurt her would have to face her head on. Wynne kept her spine perfectly straight in spite of the persistent ache rooted in the muscles of her back. Torches cast shadows over her face as she watched Aegon take a glass candle from Mayseline and slice the callused pad of his thumb on its twisted obsidian edges. Every droplet that fell onto the shell of his copper and gold dragon egg from his bleeding thumb glimmered like a ruby, bubbling and coalescing from the heat of the candleflame.

Fire and blood was a recipe for disaster. Wynne had to hope the disaster would befall their enemies, not them. If the wrong person hatched an egg, another Dance of the Dragons might ensue—and that was something Westeros could ill afford.

Roose folded his arms loosely over his chest and stood by her side, his upper arm a hairsbreadth from her shoulder. Wynne tilted her head against his shoulder and muffled a yawn in the coarse fur of her mittens. Roose smiled as she adjusted her eyeglasses, her eyes sharp behind them as the eggshell began to crack.

“Stop worrying,” Roose whispered to her.

Wynne sighed ruefully. _If only_, she thought. “Would that I could,” she whispered back, “but more dragons add more variables. In other words, more things I cannot hope to control. While I know we cannot do this alone, bringing more people into the fold is always a risk.”

“Some risks are worth taking,” Roose said.

Wynne gnawed on the inside of her cheek before she began to speak again. “House Martell and House Dayne are prime candidates for potential dragonriders,” she informed him, “but I am reluctant to relinquish an egg to anyone who might pose a threat to the North.”

“Dragons won’t be safe in the Red Keep so long as the red is Lannister crimson,” Roose said, “the Sack of King’s Landing was proof of that.”

Wynne hummed in agreement. Princess Rhaenys was betrothed to Prince Joffrey, and she was planning to use their impending marriage to reclaim her grandfather’s throne. Wynne had no objection to Rhaenys as queen, but she did worry that Queen Cersei would not abide the ascension of a younger and more beautiful woman. Especially if that woman had murdered her eldest son. Whether he richly deserved it or no.

Princess Arianne was bold and vivacious, born and raised to rule. When the secret marriage pact between House Martell and House Targaryen became a moot point, her father and uncle had reworked their plan and concocted a new conspiracy. Although she was the polar opposite of her subtle and cautious father, she was his heir and she was staunch for her cousin. Rhaenys and Arianne had grown up together at the Water Gardens, and they and their cousin Tyene were thick as thieves. Wynne had no qualms about her, beyond her worry that House Martell had no love for House Stark or the North.

Prince Quentyn was meant to rule Dorne with Rhaenys after his elder sister was crowned queen with Viserys as her king, before Daenerys and Viserys were assassinated. Quentyn was solemn and dutiful, plain of face and fearful by nature; he was fostered at Yronwood to settle a blood debt between his uncle and House Yronwood, where he squired with the Warden of the Stone Way before he was knighted. Once the secret marriage pact was broken, he was betrothed to Lady Gwyneth Yronwood. Wynne had no qualms about Quentyn, either.

Prince Trystane was a boy of thirteen, and he had begun to exhibit an affinity for water magic—the ancient river magic of the Rhoynar. It was highly unlikely that a watermage could hatch a dragon, since the elements of water and fire diametrically and dialectically opposed each other.

Prince Oberyn had eight bastard daughters: Obara, Nymeria, Tyene, Sarella, Elia, Obella, Dorea, and Loreza, collectively known as the Sand Snakes. Obara was seven-and-twenty, the irascible daughter of a whore from Oldtown who styled herself as a warrior and wielded a spear. Nymeria was four-and-twenty, the elegant daughter of a Volantene noblewoman who carried as many concealed daggers as Wynne did. If not more. Tyene was two-and-twenty, of age with her cousin Arianne, the daughter of a septa; she was the most dangerous of her sisters, because she did not seem venomous until her poison was in your veins. Sarella was almost seventeen, and she had gone to study at the Citadel under the name Alleras once she came of age, disguised as a boy; her mother was from the Summer Isles, the captain of the _Feathered Kiss_. Elia, named for Princess Elia Martell, was fifteen; she was the eldest daughter of Oberyn and Ellaria Sand, his paramour. El was nicknamed Lady Lance by her father after she began tilting at rings. Obella was twelve, while her younger sister Dorea was ten and their younger sister Loreza was a girl of seven.

There was also the Red Viper himself. Oberyn was dangerous, bloodthirsty and unpredictable. Wynne had qualms about him, but Mayseline had reached out to him through Willas in order to forge an alliance on behalf of their magical cabal despite her anxiety. Oberyn and Willas often corresponded about horses and higher mysteries. Their incongruous friendship mitigated her qualms somewhat.

Ser Gerold Dayne was another quandary. Darkstar was known as the most dangerous man in Dorne: poisonous, jealous, ambitious. When the princess to whom he had sworn his sword was crowned queen, the Knight of High Hermitage hoped to become her king consort.

Edric Dayne, the young Lord of Starfall, was a boy of eleven; he had served as a page at Blackhaven and at ten he was squired to Ser Beric Dondarrion, the Lightning Lord. Lady Allyria Dayne, aunt to Ned and cousin to Gerold, was betrothed to Lord Beric. It fell to Allyria to rule Starfall as regent while her nephew was fostered with the marcher lord. Elsewise, she would have married her betrothed years ago.

Orys Baratheon was a dragonseed and Lord Ormund Baratheon had married Princess Rhaelle Targaryen, so the stags were potential dragonriders as well. Robert was crowned in the aftermath of his rebellion because his grandmother was a Targaryen, so his claim to the Iron Throne was upheld by right of conquest and by right of blood. Wynne suspected that Proudwing was meant for Stannis, and Robert had no shortage of bastards. Mya Stone in the Vale, Bella Rivers at the Peach, Gendry Waters in Flea Bottom, Edric Storm at Storm’s End.

Cersei had eliminated the twins he fathered on a serving girl at Casterly Rock three years prior and Robert had kept his other bastards in King’s Landing out of sight. When the queen learned that Jon Arryn was investigating the rumors about her cuckolding the king, she eliminated as many of them as the red and gold cloaks she bribed could find so they couldn’t become a threat to her children. Cersei was far too impatient and incautious to realize that doing so might have given credence to the rumors until after the fact.

Mayseline and Wynne had vehemently agreed that neither Robert nor Renly were viable options. It galled her that she was kin to the king through House Blackwood, albeit only as his third cousin; Prince Rhaegar had been her third cousin as well, so Rhaenys, Aegon, Jon and Aly were her third cousins once removed. Then there were the dowagers. Princess Daella and Princess Rhae, Mayseline’s great-great-grandmothers on either side and sisters to both Maester Aemon and Aegon the Unlikely as well as Daeron the Drunken and Aerion Brightflame, had each hatched a dragon. Daella was nine-and-ninety while Rhae was seven-and-ninety, but they were spry and still as sharp-witted as ever. It was they who taught Mayseline how to rule Darkdell after her uncle died. Betha Blackwood was Targaryen enough to hatch a dragon, since her mother had been Mya Rivers; her sister Morgana and daughter Rhaelle were as well, and Morgana was mother to Hoster Tully and Brynden the Blackfish. It was possible that all of the Starks were Targaryen enough to hatch dragon eggs, since Catelyn was a great-great-granddaughter of Aegon the Unworthy. Wynne had no shortage of qualms about _that_, but she was borrowing trouble. Robb hadn’t been drawn to any of the dragon eggs on the floor, and Sansa hadn’t seemed to have an affinity for either of the unhatched eggs Wynne had shown her.

Roose unfolded his strong arms, took her chin in his hand, and tilted her face up. “If you must overthink everything, my lady,” he murmured, “share your thoughts with me.”

If things had gone according to plan, they might have returned to the Dreadfort by now. Premature labor was very common with twins, and he worried for Wynne and their unborn sons. Bethany had whelped Robar and Reece a month early and both of them had died less than a week after their nameday. Roose had been so proud of his wife for giving him not one but two sons, and Bethany was depressed for over a year after they lost them. It wasn’t something he ever wanted to experience again, especially not with the woman he…

Wynne narrowed her eyes at him behind her eyeglasses and kissed the heel of his hand, softly. “It seems I am not alone in worrying,” she deduced.

“Your prepartum confinement should have begun a sennight ago,” Roose pointed out.

Wynne tugged her bottom lip between her teeth and gnawed anxiously. “I have not felt any false labor pains,” she informed him, “nor have I bled since my first trimester. Which Maester Uthor, Maester Tybald, Maester Ellyndor, and Salvia all said was perfectly normal. Othell Yarwyck had a sleigh constructed for me, so I won’t ride on horseback to Whitetree on the morrow. It shouldn’t take longer than a week to travel there and back again.”

Mance had wanted to meet at the Fist of the First Men, but they had eventually agreed to meet at Whitetree because the Fist was three hundred miles northeast of the Wall as the crow flies and Wynne didn’t want to travel that far while pregnant. Whitetree was located in the Haunted Forest, a hundred miles northwest of Castle Black.

Roose had never been so fretful over someone before, nor felt the need to protect and coddle someone. What he felt was so horrible and uncharacteristic of him that it could only be love. Roose knew he was capable of feeling such a thing, for he did love Domeric and he felt the same emotional attachment to the twins she carried.

This was a horse of a different color, however. Roose couldn’t even blame her, because he knew that such a thing had never been her intention. Most noble marriages were about consolidating power and forging alliances, not anything so trifling as love. Theirs was no exception. It mattered not, because she was his whether she returned his love or no.

Roose held her gaze and caressed her cheek with his thumb as tenderly as he knew how. “No harm will come to you while my blood still runs,” he said with soft vehemence. “I swear it to you.”

* * *

Mayseline did not say goodbye, as was their custom. Aegon waited to approach her until her husband had left the hall to find a privy. “Lady Bolton,” he said quietly as Eliandra, his dragonling named in honor of his mother Princess Elia, crawled from where she was cradled in the crook of his elbow to cling onto the fabric of his cloak over his shoulder, “may I speak with you?”

Wynne tilted her head and looked at him sagaciously. “Do you need my permission?” she asked even though she knew the answer was no. Aegon had been forced to abdicate his claim to the Iron Throne after his family was deposed, but he was still a prince and that meant he technically outranked her—even though her blood was arguably just as royal as his by the standards of the North. If not moreso, since the ancient bloodlines of the First Men kings from whence she descended predated both Old Valyria and House Martell.

Aegon tactfully ignored the barb in her tone, for he was smart enough to understand that she was attempting to see how he would respond to someone questioning his birthright and undermining his authority. Rhaegar might have failed to grasp the nuance, while Aerys would not have stood for even the slightest tinge of disrespect. Aegon, however, didn’t rise to the bait. Instead he smiled at her. “I understand your reluctance to ally yourself with my uncles,” he said. “Dorne is located at the opposite end of the realm. It’s also the least populous and perhaps the poorest of the mainland southron kingdoms. What you most desire from Dorne is not wealth, however. I was granted permission to offer you an opportunity to retrieve your father’s remains from the northern end of the Prince’s Pass after Rhaenys is crowned, in exchange for your support of her claim. This diplomatic mission proves that you have the Warden of the North’s ear, and through him the ear of the Hand of the King.”

Wynne forced herself not to gnaw on the inside of her cheek and put her anxiety on display for someone that she did not trust. “I despise Robert because of his incompetence,” she informed him acerbically, “but your father was no better. Aerys massacred two hundred noblemen, and Rhaegar implicitly condoned such tyranny by taking command of the royalist host and leading his father’s armies into battle against the rebel forces instead of condemning his father’s madness and proclaiming his marriage to Lyanna Stark for all the realm to see or conspiring with the rebel forces to fake a royalist victory and dethrone his father with minimal bloodshed. It was inevitable that House Targaryen would fall. While I have no objection to your sister becoming queen, my loyalty is first and foremost to the North and my people. I will leave my father to rot if I must do so in order to protect my home. Targaryen restoration is not my endgame.”

“As for Lord Arryn,” said Roose upon his return from the privy, “he was murdered this afternoon. Poisoned by his wife.”

Wynne hummed in agreement while her husband moved to stand by her side, towering head and shoulders over her in a manner that always made her feel small in the safest way. “Pycelle is going to assume his death to be of natural causes,” she clarified, “since Jon Arryn was quite old. Lysa Arryn intends to insist that her husband was murdered and blame the Lannisters for his death when the opportunity to do so arises. It’s part of a grander scheme concocted by Lord Baelish to incite chaos and distract the future Hand of the King so his crimes won’t be discovered.”

“What crimes?” Jon asked her.

Wynne peeled one of her mittens from beneath the cuff of her sleeve and held up three fingers. “Money laundering,” she folded one of her fingers into her palm, “child prostitution,” she folded another of her fingers, then the third, “and slavery. Lord Baelish has a network of bribed officials who help him steal from shipments of coin and repurpose gold and silver belonging to other kingdoms in order to replenish the royal treasury. Which is highly illegal, since the king’s incomes are limited to the revenue of the Crownlands. Flea Bottom is full of young orphans with no one to notice if they go missing. While some people do sell their bodies willingly—particularly the prostitutes from establishments owned and operated by women like the Mole’s Town brothel or the Hollowtree in Barrowton or the Winter Town brothel or the Peach in Stony Sept or Chataya’s in King’s Landing—most become prostitutes because they are forced to choose between prostitution and starvation. This is why some noblemen, like Stannis,” she flicked her gaze to Aly before she continued, “have fruitlessly lobbied to make prostitution illegal. I disagree with that idea, because all indiscriminate criminalization does is punish those who need our help the most for doing what is necessary in order to survive. What prostitutes need are legal protections to prevent them and their ilk from being ill-used by the wealthy and powerful.”

“There’s a difference between a peasant stealing food because otherwise they or someone they love will die of starvation and a wealthy lord stealing for profit and personal gain,” Aly said.

Wynne nodded succinctly. “Lord Baelish is quite a schemer,” she said, “but nothing can staunch the flow of blood from the festering wound that is Robert Baratheon. Those spending habits of his will continue to drain the royal treasury until he dies.”

Aly wisely didn’t speak of the regicidal insight Wynne had seen fit to share with her. Despite the connection she felt to Aegon, she didn’t know whether or not he could be trusted with such vital information. Wynne often spoke of the king in such a way that it bordered on high treason, expressing a dissenting opinion that might brew trouble for her and for the North if the wrong person were to overhear her. Even though nothing the Lady of the Dreadfort said about the king was untrue. Wynne didn’t tell lies; she only lied by omission.

_Does it count as treason if she knows the queen is going to assassinate the king and watches it happen from leagues away instead of trying to stop it?_ Aly wondered.

Robert Baratheon would have smashed their skulls with his warhammer if he’d known she and her twin were born of Rhaegar Targaryen’s seed, as he’d crushed the silver prince’s chest and scattered the rubies from his breastplate into the roaring waters of the Trident. Aly wouldn’t mourn him, even though he’d professed to love her mother and the only father she had ever known thought of him as something akin to a brother.

“My lady mother still claims Lord Rickard Stark had southron ambitions,” said Wynne, “she believes his former maester—Walys Flowers, the bastard son of Lady Fulvia Hightower and an archmaester of the Citadel—was able to manipulate him into betrothing his heir to Lady Catelyn rather than any of the eligible daughters of his bannermen. Lord Arryn marrying Lysa Tully and Lord Rickard betrothing Lyanna Stark to Robert Baratheon were indeed part of a grander scheme to create a permanent Great Council with representatives of each kingdom, in order to mitigate the unchecked tyranny of Targaryen kings like Aerys.”

“Westeros has been one realm ever since the marriage pact was made between House Targaryen and House Martell,” said Aegon, “but each kingdom has its own cultures and its own needs. I think Rhaenys would support the formation of a permanent Great Council. Uncle Oberyn could represent Dorne, and we could have a man of the Night’s Watch represent the brotherhood.”

_Rhaenys should be queen_, Aly thought, _but if Wynne chooses to put Lord Stannis on the Iron Throne, I will emulate Good Queen Alysanne. I shall hold women’s courts all over the realm and fulfill my grandfather’s ambition. My ancestors were conquerors and tyrants, and even the best of them never allowed women to reign without men to rule over them. I won’t uphold that legacy if I am ever crowned._

* * *

At the hour of the nightingale, Wynne flicked her fingers and moved the mattress from where it lay with one edge against the stone wall to bask in the light of the fire burning in the hearth. Roose watched it float in midair for a few seconds as her magic subsided before it reacquainted itself with the floor. “My lady grows bold,” he whispered in his quiet deep voice.

Wynne blushed even though she knew he was only playing with her, because it amused him to see her get flustered; she responded by removing her mittens and unfastening her cloak. Instead of hanging it up by the door, she piled it atop the furs and blankets on the featherbed and put her mittens on the mantle above the fireplace while he unfastened his pink cloak and swept it over the furs. Roose splayed one strong hand at the small of her back and intertwined the fingers of his other hand with hers as she took her slippers off, balancing precariously upon one foot and then the other. After she regained her footing, his palm smoothed up the curve of her spine and he untied the knot underneath the nape of her neck. Roose made quick work of her laces, each touch of his callused fingers on the skin of her shoulders and back making her shiver as her woolen gown and lambswool kirtle were stripped from her body; her woolen chemise was lined with satin too fine to irritate her skin, her leggings made of doeskin lined with rabbit fur.

When she turned and stepped out of her skirts and leggings, her fingers went to the fastenings of his doublet. First the laces at his cuffs from the inside of his wrists halfway to the bends of his elbows, then the laces that began at the base of his throat. Beneath his doublet was a black woolen tunic, red undertunic, fur-lined leather breeches, leggings made of undyed lambswool, woolen socks and silk braies; they had both dressed for comfort and warmth, not for the aesthetic. Wynne kissed his collarbone because she could not go up on tiptoe and kiss his mouth with her ankles so very swollen. Instead she dug her fingers into his bare shoulders for balance and kissed his chest, her teeth snagging on his nipples to make him clench his teeth and hiss. This was their last night behind the safeguard of the Wall before they would venture into the dark forest, and she had no intention of spending the night filled with anxiety when she could be full of Roose instead.

Wynne felt unwieldy as she knelt to unlace his breeches. As she tugged at the laces with her fingers and undid them, she held his gaze and stroked his cock through his smallclothes with her thumbs. Roose was half-hard by the time she dragged his breeches down his thighs and he tangled the fingers of one hand in her hair to keep her on her knees before him, his grip tightening as she grabbed a pillow and finagled it under her knees. “How practical,” he murmured with a dash of fond amusement in his tone.

“I enjoy sucking your cock more if I am not uncomfortable while I am doing so,” Wynne deadpanned in spite of the persistent flush that still permeated her cheeks.

Roose smirked, his eyes glittering in the firelight. “What makes you think I want you to suck me off?” he asked.

Wynne arched her eyebrows at him before she gently poked the underside of his shaft through his smallclothes with one fingertip, as if to wordlessly make her point.

Roose smirked wider. “My lady should never assume,” he admonished. “I want to fuck those pretty breasts of yours.”

Wynne shivered as her arousal cut like a knife deep below her navel; the sensation of his fingers in her hair felt like twisting that knife, because he knew she enjoyed it when he was a little rough with her. As she undid the laces of her chemise and shed the undergarment to avoid staining the satin, she felt his eyes on her. Where they belonged. Once her breasts were out, another shiver went shuddering through her because the flames couldn’t quite vanquish the sempiternal chill that lingered at the edge of the world. Wynne adjusted her eyeglasses as her desire began to eclipse her anxiety.

It was impossible to know whether her nipples were hard from the cold or because of how much she desired her husband; her pregnancy had made her want him more, oddly enough. Roose was only too happy to oblige her. It seemed as though he enjoyed the ways her body had changed: her breasts were fuller, her nipples darker, her belly swollen with his seed. Roose even seemed to like the colostrum that sometimes leaked from her breasts when he played with her nipples. It was a thicker and sweeter precursor to breastmilk, almost like cream.

Wynne squeezed her breasts and rubbed them up against his length, her strokes dragging his smooth foreskin down until his cockhead was exposed. As the colostrum began to leak out of her nipples, the pearl of precum glistening on the head of his cock beckoned. Wynne felt him shudder and every muscle in his back, stomach, and thighs went taut when she wrapped her lips around the blunt tip of his cock and licked the crest before she teased the slit on the head of him with her tongue.

Roose groaned low in his throat and his jaw clenched, his other hand tangling in her hair while he looked down at her. “I suppose you just couldn’t resist,” he murmured, “could you? Have I made you wanton, sweet girl?”

Wynne hummed softly around his cockhead and tasted the precum that spilled onto her tongue, mixing with the heavy saliva that had begun to pool in her mouth at the intimately familiar scent of his sweat and skin; her nipples were harder now, her clit throbbing, her sweat mingling with the stickier fluid. Then she removed her breasts from his cock and dipped her head to lick at his balls, slipping her tongue back and forth before she took his warm sac that had not yet begun to shrink from the cold despite his nakedness into her mouth and sucked. Wynne felt his cock pulse near her nose and licked him with the flat of her tongue from the root to his blunt tip before she lifted her breasts and squeezed them around his length again. Filthy indecorous noises accompanied her lips and tongue with every lick and suck, and those sounds no longer embarrassed her even though she knew doing this was most improper. Wynne rubbed her nipples up against his cockhead, her tongue curling over the sensitive ridge on the underside as she moaned.

“Yes,” Roose whispered and thrust roughly into the soft pressure of her breasts as she slowly stroked him, “just like that with your tongue. I’ve trained you so well.”

Wynne stopped when she felt him swell in between her breasts and he came inside her mouth in hot, thick spurts. Roose enjoyed the sight of her so very much that he always endeavored to keep his pale eyes open in the throes of passion, so a flourish of satisfaction bloomed in her chest and took root deep in her belly when his eyes fluttered shut. Wynne sat back on her haunches and waited until he opened his eyes again to open her mouth and show him all the seed on her tongue. Roose watched her swallow his load and lick him clean, his gaze intense.

“What a mess I’ve made of you,” he said without even a hint of remorse in his voice.

Wynne resisted the urge to roll her eyes and clean up the aforementioned mess, because she felt the precum and sweat and colostrum smeared all over her chest beginning to dry. It wasn’t a comfortable sensation after the fact. Roose laughed at the awkward expression on her face and watched her squirm for a moment to amuse himself even further before he went to fetch the basin of fresh snow lurking by the hearth. Most of the snow had melted into water from the heat of the fire, and he folded a small undyed cloth into quarters before he offered the scrap of cotton to her. Wynne dipped the cloth into the basin and inhaled a startled breath at how cold the water had remained in spite of the flames casting malleable shadows throughout the chamber. Sharp chills made her skin prickle with gooseflesh as she folded the cloth over the metal rim of the basin and put the pillow back. “Thank you, my lord,” she said.

“Of course.” Roose peeled back the blankets and furs. “Come to bed, my lady.”

Wynne muffled a loud yawn with the back of one hand and took her eyeglasses off before she moved to lay with her back against his chest, because her pregnant belly made sleeping on her stomach unfeasible. Roose kissed the nape of her neck once they were snug beneath the furs and cupped her breasts in his palms with precision and care; he gently pinched the hard pink tips between his fingers, mindful of how sensitive her nipples were. Wynne bit her lip in a futile attempt to stifle a moan as her clit began throbbing again. Need hummed through her as her skin tingled at the heat of his breath ghosting over the back of her neck, her muscles quivering as her cunt ached to be filled by him.

Roose kept playing with her breasts and nipping at her neck until he was hard again, one hand or the other straying in between her thighs to tease her until she hovered on the brittle edge of pleasure. When he nudged one of his thighs in between her legs to spread her open and thrust into her from behind while he pinched her swollen clit, she plummeted over the edge and came so hard she uttered a sound that was half scream and half sob. Roose made a smug noise low in his throat and kissed her over her shoulder, the fingers of one hand digging into the flesh of her left hip to hold her where he wanted her. “Look at you,” he said low and hot in her ear and twisted her clit to make her come again and again, “in such a state from pleasuring me.”

Wynne frowned as the glimmering bliss of her orgasms began to fade and it became apparent that he wasn’t planning to move; his cock was balls deep inside of her and her cunt was convulsing around him, but he wasn’t fucking her. Roose sometimes fell asleep when he was still hard inside of her, but he wasn’t falling asleep quite yet. Wynne attempted to rut against him experimentally, but he tightened his grip on her hip and tangled his legs with hers to hold her still as his cock twitched and thickened within her.

“I am in no mood for your games,” she mumbled.

Roose gently wrapped his other hand around her neck and stroked his callused thumb over where her pulse spiked. “This is not a game,” he whispered as she inhaled sharply through her nose, “and it seems that you need to learn how to control yourself.”

Wynne snorted and forced herself not to squirm or whimper or beg. “I prefer taking orders from you to being in control,” she retorted with a yawn. “If only in a prurient context.”

Roose chuckled softly and kissed the hunch of her shoulder. “I am not a man to be undone,” he whispered in her ear and something in the cadence of his deep voice made her stomach lurch as his beard rasped over her skin, “but I am forever undone by you.”


	32. Battle of the Haunted Forest {VII}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 2**  
Chapter 7: Battle of the Haunted Forest {VII}
> 
> Onward to Whitetree.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m aware that all forms of sign language have their own grammar and lexicon, but for the sake of coherence the sign language used in the prose of this fic will be written in English. Wynne and Roose are both given descriptive name signs (“perceive” with a W and “cunning” with an R) rather than arbitrary ones, because I don’t know enough about the minutiae of sign language to make up arbitrary name signs. YEET.

**All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.**

Zora Neale Hurston, _Their Eyes Were Watching God_

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅩⅤⅠ ❧**

298 AC

_At the edge of the Haunted Forest, in the wilderness beyond the Wall_

* * *

Dawn broke in a grey sky, the hazy firmament so pale it was almost as white as the snow on the ground. Puffs of hot breath steamed in the cold morning air as Aly emerged from the dark tunnel cut through the Wall astride a blood bay mare. Robb and Jon sat tall on their horses with her between them, as if to shield her from the eyes of the rangers. Sable, Ghost, and Grey Wind had been placed in saddle baskets, because the direwolf pups were too small to keep pace with the horses for half a hundred miles.

Northern girls all knew the story of Brave Danny Flint, and hearing Locke humming the song to himself made Aly feel even more ill at ease in spite of how outnumbered the rangers were. There were almost a thousand men with the Boltons, half a hundred sent by each high lord of the North, whereas the Night’s Watch had offered a hundred men—half the rangers garrisoned at Castle Black. Such a small force paled in comparison to a hundred thousand wildlings, but they weren’t planning to wage a war against them. If the negotiations went badly, they wouldn’t need higher numbers to win a war. Not with a greenseer in their midst.

Wynne fell asleep in her sleigh with the roughspun curtains drawn and Vermithora nestled in the blankets and furs at her feet before they opened the tunnel gate, her eyeglasses tucked into one of the many pockets hidden in her skirts while her sable hood fell over her face. It seemed that in addition to her verdant magic, she also possessed the uncanny ability to doze off under any and all circumstances. Frostfyre, Steelsong, and Proudwing had remained at Queensgate, lest they fall to ice javelins thrown by the Others.

Lord Bolton rode a black palfrey with eerily pale blue eyes. He wore black ringmail and steel plate armor over a quilted tunic of bloodred leather and fur-lined black leather breeches, his rondels fashioned in the shape of men whose disembodied heads screamed in silent agony. From his shoulders billowed his woolen pink cloak, and long streamers of red silk fluttered atop his helm. Daggers were sheathed in his boots, and a dragonbone bow strung with cattlegut and a quiver of arrows with obsidian arrowheads were strapped to his saddle. Red Queen, the ancestral sword of House Bolton, was sheathed at his left hip beside his flaying knife.

_My ally_, Wynne had dubbed him. _My shield and sword. My knife in the shadows_. Aly felt a chill run down her spine at the sight of the Lord of the Dreadfort in full battle regalia and knew she would not want him as her enemy.

Ser Wendel Manderly was almost too fat to sit ahorse. Roger Ryswell rode beside his cousin in silence. According to Wynne, he was the quietest of her quarrelsome uncles. Roger was Master of Woodsedge and he had been named the heir to the Rills in the aftermath of Robert’s Rebellion because Ser Mark Ryswell, his elder brother, had died at the Tower of Joy. Ser Helman Tallhart, Master of Torrhen’s Square, rode beside Galbart Glover, Master of Deepwood Motte, and his young ward Larence Snow, the bastard of Hornwood, natural son of Lord Halys Hornwood. Larence was only a boy of eleven who should never have been permitted to venture beyond the Wall, but he was a squire and his knight-master had not seen the harm in bringing him along because he did not believe the white walkers were real.

Ellard Harclay, the heir to Blue Moon Hill, was riding with his brother Ronnel Harclay, a ranger. Alongside them cantered Ser Byam Flint, another ranger whose cousin and goodsister Lyessa was Lady of Widow’s Watch. Karlon and Harlon Umber, the second and third sons of the Greatjon, rode beside their cousin Arnold Karstark, whose grandfather was Arnolf Karstark, castellan of Karhold. Wynne had spurned all three of them.

Aegon rode a red sand steed with a black mane gifted to him by his uncle. Beneath his black fur cloak, his black steel armor was burnished with copper filigree that spun into bright sunbursts and copper rondels in the shape of roaring dragon heads. Eliandra perched upon his broad shoulders, sharp black teeth shining in the early morning sunlight as fumes of orange smoke unfurled from her slit nostrils. It was plain to see that Aegon was a prince. Not because of the finery he wore or even the dragon; because of his regal bearing. It was less obvious that Aly herself was a princess. Which ought to have pleased her, but part of her envied her half-brother because he obviously knew who he was.

Jon watched their half-brother ride ahead with the rangers with a shrewd gaze and found it hard to look away from him. When he turned and looked at the Wall, it blazed crystalline blue in the hazy sunshine. Centuries worth of windblown dust shrouded the precipice until the light touched it. Then it shone, alive with light and magic. Gaunt wooden outlines of monstrous cranes and huge catapults perched atop the Wall, like the skeletons of prehistoric birds that silently stood sentry while men in black walked between them seeming as small as ants. Jon shivered at the sight and turned his back on the overwhelmingly colossal white crag of ice that filled up half the sky on the horizon. _This is the end of the world_, the Wall seemed to whisper in his ear as his palfrey gracefully trotted past the edge of the world and into the dark forest.

In another life, he might have become a sworn brother of the Night’s Watch. Black had always been his color, moreso than white or grey. Jon would’ve been a ranger like his uncle Benjen, his life spent venturing beyond the Wall to patrol the Haunted Forest and battle the wildlings and ward the realm against the Others; but girls couldn’t join the Night’s Watch, and it would have broken his heart to leave Aly alone at Winterfell, to leave Robb and Arya and Bran and Rickon and even Sansa and Lyanna and Lorra behind.

Aly kept pace with him while Robb overtook the both of them, the hooves of their horses kicking up snow in their wake as the forest swallowed them in one gulp. In the boughs above them, the wind whispered with the voices of primordial gods whose names had been forgotten long ago. Beyond the Wall, they were the only gods.

_Maybe the forest is truly haunted_, Jon thought, _by the ghosts of the First Men. This place was theirs, once_.

All of Westeros had belonged to the First Men until the Andals brought the Seven across the Narrow Sea. Before the First Men came, the realm had belonged to the Children of the Forest and the old gods.

_What’s west of Westeros? _was a question Arya had asked constantly when she began her history and geography lessons. _What’s north of the North?_

Jon rode northwest of the North and wished his fierce little sister could see it, even as the forest thickened into tangles of black wood and the dim shadows cast by the ancient trees grew darker and darker until only slivers of light remained.

* * *

_At a campground in the Haunted Forest three days away from Castle Black, in the wilderness beyond the Wall_

* * *

Night fell and the sun rose again without incident for everyone but Wynne. After she awoke from her long nap, his little wife had sung a song of the forest to allow a thousand men to ride unseen by the Others until her lovely voice withered in her soft throat. Roose watched her cough up blood that she mixed into a tincture of feverfew, rosemary, lavender and honey she brewed to mitigate her migraines in anticipation of precisely this. By adding the magic in her blood to her tincture, she made the healing properties of the herbs more potent. Roose sat beside her in the sleigh while his decoy rode in full armor with a very convincing replica of Red Queen, identical but for the blade. Castle-forged steel was fine, but it wasn’t so fine as Valyrian steel.

“Feverfew is used as treatment for a fever,” she told him in sign language, “migraines, inflammation, arthritis, toothaches, and stomachaches. It can also be used to increase the production of breastmilk, so wet nurses often drink tea with feverfew and lemongrass or butterbur. Lavender is used as treatment for anxiety, insomnia, headaches, minor burns, and insect bites. It’s also an anodyne. Rosemary is used as treatment for indigestion and myalgia. It can be used to increase hair growth, improve poor circulation, and enhance memory and concentration. I also brewed an herbal tea with slippery elm bark, ginger root, licorice root, marshmallow root, wild cherry bark, orange peel, mullein leaf, fennel seed, clove bud, lemon and honey for my throat.”

Roose watched her wince as she drank her first sip of tea from a silver flask. Vermithora had boiled the water inside with a gust of hot breath, and she had steeped her tea for a few minutes while they spoke. When they were still courting, Wynne had brewed him a different kind of tea at every meal. Chamomile lemongrass. Honey lavender. Orange clove. Lemon ginger. Roasted dandelion. Lemon balm. Honey spruce. Caramel skullcap. Wild rosehip. Chrysanthemum nettle. Raspberry passionfruit. Spiced apricot. Blueberry lemon. Every tea blend she made was delicious. “How does it taste?” he asked.

“It’s good,” Wynne signed, “potent.”

Since most of the words she used didn’t have specific hand signs, Wynne fingerspelled them while she modulated and reduplicated other words for emphasis. Roose had learned sign language because his mother had been deaf from birth. Wynne learned to sign because the woodswitch Salvia was hard-of-hearing and she had a deaf granddaughter, Alyssum, who lost her hearing after she almost died of a fever when she was two.

It was a useful way to communicate while hunting, so they often spoke to each other manually instead of verbally—sometimes they even made up their own signs because they didn’t want to fingerspell certain words.

There was a chance their children would be deaf as Broderick, one of his sons who died still in the cradle, had been. Although hearing loss was sometimes hereditary, it had skipped his generation. Roose was grateful for that, because his father would have disposed of him and his sisters if they had been deaf like their lady mother.

“We’ve gone seven-and-forty miles thus far,” Wynne signed. “If they can keep up the pace, the negotiations will begin overmorrow as planned.”

Roose nodded brusquely. “Let us hope you will be able to speak verbally by then,” he said.

“I may have no choice but to have you interpret for me.” Wynne sighed. “I asked each northern lord for half a dozen men, to show their support. Half a hundred men from each lord was _excessive_, and they’re slowing us down. If we’d brought two hundred men instead of a thousand, we might have ridden for only five days instead of seven. But of course they thought they all knew better than me. What can a mere _girl_ know of tactics?” she rolled her eyes behind her eyeglasses as she gesticulated. “As though my granduncle Willifer isn’t the leading expert in the field of polemology in our realm, and he hasn’t taught me everything he knows. As though I have not seen every battle ever fought. As though I have not witnessed every war ever waged. Even the men who claim to love me underestimate me.”

Roose took her hand in his own and smiled at how much smaller her hand was than his before he kissed her dainty fingers. When she blushed a pretty shade of pink, he smiled wider. “It would be unwise to underestimate you,” he murmured. “I’d never do such a thing.”

“I know.” Wynne tapped the tips of her fingers twice against the side of her forehead and took an unladylike gulp of herbal tea from her flask before she adjusted her eyeglasses and stared at him shrewdly.

_But you’ve never claimed to love me_ hung unspoken between them, the heavy silence almost deafening. Neither of them seemed to hear the sound of snow being crushed underneath the sleigh or the cacophonous beat of four thousand hooves that surrounded them in every direction as they held each other’s gaze. If not for the infinitesimal hunch of her shoulders, he never would’ve known how anxious she truly was.

Roose cupped her face in both hands and kissed her slowly, nipping at her bottom lip with his teeth and dipping his tongue into her mouth. She tasted of honey and ethanol and blood, sweet and cruel. Roose stroked her recalcitrant jaw with his thumbs as her fingertips dug into the back of his neck. Wynne held him as close as her swollen belly and their layers upon layers of winter clothing permitted. Roose moaned his approval when she delicately sucked on his tongue and softly flicked hers against his. All of the fear that sank its cold teeth into him when they rode through the tunnel beneath the Wall melted away for a moment, thawed by the warmth of his wife and the frenzied beat of his own heart. “Stop worrying and go back to sleep, my lady,” he ordered softly after he broke the kiss and gently took off her eyeglasses. “Tonight will be another long night.”

“Wake me before dusk, my lord,” Wynne signed and squinted at him so hard her brow furrowed as she narrowed her autumnal eyes into thin slits. “If you don’t, we won’t live to see the sun rise again.”

* * *

_At Whitetree, a small village northwest of Castle Black in the Haunted Forest, in the wilderness beyond the Wall_

* * *

Whitetree consisted of four tumbledown houses of unmortared stone and roofed with sod, the windows shuttered with tattered pieces of hide. Above them loomed a great weirwood, the entire village shaded by its thick branches. Gnarled roots were piled with several feet of snow. There was a sheepfold and a well beneath the tree, overshadowed by obvoluted broad dark red leaves. Whitetree had been abandoned by the sheepherders who lived in these houses a few moonturns ago, but Wynne didn’t need magic to feel the eyes of the scouts Mance Rayder had sent ahead peering out at her through the windows. One of them was a skinchanger whose golden eagle had perched on the edge of the well to watch her.

Once the subterranean city beneath the village was inhabited by the Children of the Forest, before the Night King turned on them and rooted them out. It was empty now but for thick white roots that had twisted into the soil, tangling in the dark tunnels and taking up residence in caves full of bones, the skeletons of creatures that had gone extinct. Wynne emerged from her sleigh and squeezed her eyelids shut as the shades of the past encroached on the present in her periphery. Greenseers had named this forest, and those who could not control their arboreal magic went mad beneath these ancient trees. When she opened her eyes, she caught sight of the bones in the hollow maw of the heart tree.

It was colder without the shelter of the forest, the ground near enough to frozen to feel comfortably firm beneath her feet. Most of the animals in the forest remained in their hollow trees and burrows unless they needed to venture out in order to forage for food, with the exception of the snow birds: crossbills with twisted beaks made to pry seeds from pinecones, elusive goshawks with bloodred eyes, buntings who nested in rock crevices in the midst of molting, longspurs with their elongated sharp hindclaws, rare waxwings, eyepopping yellow grosbeak finches who nested in conifers, three varieties of rosy finches, and redpolls who burrowed into the snow itself to keep themselves warm. It smelled of fresh snow and loam and wild, like home away from home. Roose kept a hand on the small of her back as she approached the weirwood through its tangle of snowcapped roots. When she peeled her mittens off, he wordlessly offered her a knife and watched her slice open the heart line on her left palm; her eyes turned white as her other hand splayed over the pale bark in between the eyes of the weirwood and she absorbed everything her flesh and blood eyes had missed since the last time she had touched a weirwood.

“An old tree,” Lord Commander Mormont said.

“_Old_,” his raven agreed from where it perched upon his shoulder. “_Old_.”

“Look at that face,” said Thoren Smallwood, the ranger who commanded the vanguard. “Small wonder men feared them when they first came to Westeros. I’d like to take an axe to the bloody thing myself.”

Wynne turned and looked at him over her shoulder as hot blood dripped from her hand into the mouth of the weirwood, its maw red with old resin and blackened by fire. “There’s a saying in my family,” she said, her mellifluous voice so raw from overuse that all of the honey had bled out of its cadence until only the hemlock remained. “Where the offense is, let the axe fall. Do my gods offend you, Ser? Why is that? All gods are cruel, the old and the new. Yours are no different from mine on that score. All gods dispense suffering without reason, for they would not be worshipped otherwise. However, only half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.”

Jon dismounted before the ranger answered her question. “I can feel the power,” he said. “Do you feel it too?”

Wynne nodded succinctly as the flow of blood from the shallow cut on her other hand began to slow. Ser Jarman Buckwell sent out scouts to search the wilderness of leaf and root surrounding the village, while Ser Mallador ordered the stewards and men-at-arms to unload the packhorses and sledges in the baggage train. Lyra Mormont, who had spent the last three days riding with her uncle and telling the Old Bear everything he never wanted to know about the nieces he had never seen, sat astride her mount with her morningstar strapped to her back and skinchanged into a bear to scout with the best sense of smell on earth. Like her mother and sisters, the she-bear had muddied green eyes, wild black hair and dark brown skin. Lyra towered over Wynne by almost a foot, and she wore layers of furs and ringmail and boiled leather and sheepskin and wool that made her appear bulkier than she truly was. There was something watchful about her, a tense awareness in the curve of her neck and in the muscles of her back and shoulders that spoke of a keen attention paid to her surroundings. Lyra could talk the ear off a deaf person, but this she-bear missed nothing.

Aly dismounted and stood with one hand on the hilt of her sword beneath her cloak. “My lord father believes that no one can tell a lie before a heart tree,” she said, “the old gods know when men lie.”

Mormont nodded gruffly. “My father believed the same,” he said.

“As did my lady mother,” Roose said, his quiet deep voice barely above a whisper as he stared into the eyes of the weirwood. Lady Revna Bolton was born a Crowl of Deepdown on the island of Skagos, where the stoneborn would slay any pirates unfortunate enough to pillage their shores and string their innards from the branches of the heart trees in their godswoods like garlands. Roose was fostered at Driftwood Hall, where he learned how to kill and skin a unicorn…among other things. _Only heart trees ever see half of what we do on Skagos_, Lord Stane had often said to him.

Wynne huffed out a sigh, her warm breath visible in the frostbitten air. _Such power isn’t of much use when people lie to themselves_, she thought ruefully.

“Do you speak to the dead?” Mormont asked her. “It’s said the Children of the Forest could. What about greenseers?”

Wynne gnawed on the inside of her cheek and forced herself to swallow a caustic retort. _I can speak to the dead_, she thought. _Alas, the dead never answer me. Which defeats the purpose_. “Only the gods can wake the dead,” she informed him. “I am many things,”—_greenseer_, she thought, _skinchanger, alchemist, mage, witch, monster_—“but I am not arrogant enough to claim godhood. Descent from a god, perhaps. If you believe that Garth Greenhand was indeed the Horned God, or that my ancestor Thorr was the son of the Storm God.”

Amongst the old gods who had titles was the Horned God: god of the hunt, agriculture, the wilderness, fecundity and rebirth. When he came to Westeros, for a time Garth Greenhand was hailed by the Children of the Forest as the Horned God in the flesh. Until the First Men began felling trees and burning godswoods.

Gwynn the Huntress, the eldest daughter of Garth Greenhand and twin sister of Garth the Gardener, had founded House Dustin when she married Thorr, whose mother claimed he was the son of the Storm God. In the runic language of the First Men, the letter Ƿ meant _Wynn_. Wynne and Gwynn were rooted in the same ancient word, though her name was a softer mutation. It meant _joy_. _Desire_. _Pleasure_. _Bliss_. _Love. Delight_.

_What a misnomer_, Wynne thought and licked the congealed blood from the palm of her hand before she tied a strip of cloth bandage over the already-healing wound and put her mittens back on. There was nothing blissful about her.


	33. Battle of the Haunted Forest {VIII}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 2**  
Chapter 8: Battle of the Haunted Forest {VIII}
> 
> Wynne asks Roose to lie to her before the negotiations begin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mance Rayder says in “Dark Wings, Dark Words” that his army consists of ninety wildling clans, but only twenty-three wildling leaders are named in the books so that’s what I’m going with.
> 
> FUN FACT: the official gemstone of Washington state is petrified wood. There’s over seven thousand acres of petrified forest in Vantage, WA.

**At first I thought I’d lost**  
**my own body,**  
**felt it slip with the wind.**  
**Then I began**  
**to practice the faith**  
**of bare trees,**  
**learned to enter winter.**

Marcene Gandolfo, “When She Leaves, I Think of Demeter in Autumn”

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅩⅤⅠⅠ ❧**

298 AC

_At Whitetree, a small village northwest of Castle Black, in the Haunted Forest, in the wilderness beyond the Wall_

* * *

Wynne lay on her feather mattress in the house tangled in the roots of the heart tree and sang all night as the fire in the hearth flickered and _blazed_, stoked by the undiluted magic that coalesced around her. Unseen but palpable as gooseprickles tied knots in her flesh. Roose seemed to need fewer hours of sleep than she ever did, and he held her as she cast a spell in a language no human voice should have been able to speak. With the heart tree rooted in the earth beneath her, her throat did not bleed.

In the morning, the shadow of the heart tree was gone. Decaying clumps of leaves that had once burned red turned brown with rot while fallen bone white branches had fossilized, the wood petrified into opalescent stone. Others prowled the Haunted Forest, but this was never their place of power—it was _hers_.

Wynne felt no pain as she awoke to a copper tub full of steaming hot water and put her eyeglasses back on, nudging them up over her pert nose with her knuckles because her mittens were still warming her hands. By the foot of the mattress stood her husband in his tunic and breeches and woolen hose. Roose smiled at her as she sluggishly sat upright, propping herself upon her elbows. Vermithora sucked the marrow from the charred bones of a partridge, too enervated from the cold to acknowledge her awakening with more than a flickering glance.

“Wood opals are worth much in Braavos,” he said. There were no trees in Braavos, but for the soldier pines and black spruces grown on the shield islands that surrounded the city. Barges full of firewood often sailed from White Harbor to the Hundred Isles. Only the wealthiest Braavosi wore gemstones made of petrified wood, for they had become symbols of high status. “Was it your intention to opalize the heart tree, my lady?”

“No, my lord.” Wynne muffled a loud yawn with the back of one hand and shook her head slowly, wary of shaking loose a migraine. “When the greenseer who led the last hero into the Land of Always Winter cast the same protection spell, it created a petrified forest of chalcedony. I anticipated more silicification.”

“What a strange creature I married,” he mused and smiled wider.

Wynne rolled her eyes at him behind her eyeglasses and began to strip unceremoniously, unfastening her cloak and husking her surcoat from her body as one might shuck an ear of corn. “At least I’m never boring,” she quipped as her gown and kirtle and boots unlaced themselves. “Will you bathe with me?”

“Of course.”

Roose bent at the waist and offered his hand to her with the utmost courtesy; she took it and let him help her to her feet, her swollen ankles protesting most vehemently. Comfortable silence perfused into every nook and cranny of the house as Wynne gripped his upper arms for balance and stepped out of her gown and kirtle and boots onto the wood floor in her stocking feet, wiggling her toes as she went. Roose kept his hands on the soft curve of her waist and splayed his fingers over the small of her back, her gravid belly gently bumping into his stomach as she removed her woolen leggings; he undressed himself methodically and dragged her chemise up over her head without much ado.

There were often little marks on the skin of his chest, arms and legs where his leeches bled him every few days, but they healed without scarification. Roose hadn’t been leeched since before they arrived at Castle Black, so his bare skin bore no such marks now. Wynne meticulously combed scented water through her bedraggled curls and used a tiny pinch of magic to spell her hair dry, because she knew firsthand that frost would form in her damp tresses if she ventured outside with wet hair. Then she braided it and finagled it all into a hairnet woven from velveret ribbon and silver mesh before she clambered into the bathtub with him and sat with her back against his chest. It was far too cold for them to luxuriate in the water, but there was something intimate and soothing about bathing each other even if they couldn’t linger.

Roose seemed to enjoy bathing with her, especially now that her belly had swelled with his seed; he kept stroking her stomach with his callused fingers and pressing his rough palm against where the twins were kicking. Neither of them wanted to dwell on the possibility that one or both of them could die here before they had a chance to meet their sons. Wynne squeezed her eyelids shut and swallowed thickly around the hard lump that had gnarled in her throat.

“I once said that I prefer ugly truth to pretty lies,” Wynne said in a soft hush that broke the silence, “but today I need you to tell me that everything will be all right. Please,” she tilted her head back and turned to look at him beseechingly, “lie to me.”

Roose exhaled sharply through his nose, his warm breath wafting up into the dregs of the steam. Although she knew almost everything about him because she possessed preternatural powers of perception, he was still getting to know his little wife. Roose had fallen so horribly in love with her that he craved every shred of her vulnerability, every moment of weakness she chose to share with him. When she turned to look back at him, he kissed her temple as tenderly as he knew how. “Never fear,” he whispered, “everything will be all right.”

Wynne tilted her head upward to kiss his jaw and gripped the handles of the bathtub for balance as she rose to her feet through sheer force of will. Raw magic converged around her and the sheen of the water on her skin evaporated. When her feet touched the floor, she conjured fresh clothes onto her exquisitely naked body: boots, stockings, leggings, chemise, kirtle, gown, surcoat, and gloves.

Roose blinked, nonplussed. One moment her clothes were in her trunk, the next they were being worn—with the aplomb she inherited from her lady mother. Roose had chosen her outfit: black leather boots embossed with silver that matched her fur-lined surcoat with velvet ribbons in the darkest shade of red laced through silver eyelets from wrist to elbow, over the curve of her shoulders, and beneath her breasts in a fashion that would not obstruct her belly, a velvet gown in the palest shade of pink trimmed with black lace and embroidered with silver leaves veined with red, and under that a deep red kirtle with a high collar trimmed in black foxfur to keep her warm. It was meant to match her red leather gloves and the doublet and tunic he would be wearing underneath his cloak and ringmail. Wynne looked so lovely in his colors, painstakingly chosen in shades that would not clash with her hair. _No_, he thought, _she couldn’t bore me even if she tried_. “Why haven’t you ever done that before?” he asked, curious.

“Practitioners of magic are only limited by where they can draw power from,” Wynne explained, “how much power they can hold, and by the scope of their own imagination. I could not imagine a world in which I could do magic in front of another person without frightening them or being afraid of myself…” she tugged her bottom lip in between her teeth and chewed shyly before she added, “…until now.”

Roose understood how magic worked in a nutshell. Whether or not someone could do magic depended upon their inborn ability to act as a conduit for power. There was power in everything. If you drew power from the magic in your own body, you were a mage. If you channeled that power into potions and spells and rituals, you were a witch or wizard. If you drew power from the inborn magic in your own body and from the inherent magical properties in something, you were an ambient mage. If you drew power from the inherent magical properties in something in order to transform one thing into another, you were an alchemist. If you drew power from blood, you were a bloodmage. If you drew power from the flames, you were a pyromancer. If you drew power from water, you were a hydromancer. If you drew power from the earth, you were a geomancer. If you drew power from air, you were an aeromancer. If you drew power from plants, you were a greenmage.

Wynne drew power from everything. Thus, her magic was theoretically unlimited. Which had frightened her enough that for years she wasted her energy obscuring and repressing her power instead of using it.

Roose smoothly rose to his feet and stepped out of the bathtub. “Would you mind terribly doing the same for me?” he asked.

It was an odd feeling, the sensation of the bathwater wicking away; he suppressed a shudder as the fine hairs on the back of his neck and arms stood on end. There was an alchemical term for this. Ad Siccum, evaporation to dryness.

Roose held her gaze while she conjured his clothes onto his body: black leather boots, woolen hose, braies, fur-lined black leather breeches, a pink velvet tunic, fur-lined doublet made of red leather, a coat of black ringmail and a pair of fur-lined black leather gloves. Over all of that he wore his pink cloak dotted with garnet drops. Wynne fastened her cloak at her throat and spoke to her dragonling in High Valyrian, not commanding so much as politely asking. Vermithora ceased gnawing on the blackened remnants of the partridge and stood, her sharp black teeth gleaming in the light of the fire still roaring in the hearth. Roose opened the door of the house and offered a hand to her, gloved palm up. Wynne took it and let him escort her from the house to the giant pink war tent his men-at-arms had erected on his orders. Atop it flew the direwolf of House Stark, and inside the banners of House Bolton and House Dustin hung behind a great wooden chair with plush red velvet upholstery. Roose was pleased to see that it was less a war tent and more a great hall of wooden beams and pink cloth.

Such a chair wasn’t large or grand enough to truly be considered a throne, but it was big enough for he and his wife to sit upon. There was a long wooden table provided by the builders of the Night’s Watch, made so that it could be disassembled and carted back to Castle Black, set with platters of fruit and cheese and bread and fish and fowl and pitchers of water and ale and wine and lemonsweet. When you traveled with a greenseer, your provisions never spoiled. At either end of the table sat a pair of iron braziers with hot coals burning in their depths. Someone had assembled a platter for Vermithora, who swallowed a blackened ptarmigan whole and spat the bones onto the platter in a skeletal pile after she ate the marrow—the hollow bones she disgorged were dry because of the heat inside her mouth.

Wynne prepared herself a plate without touching any of the food and poured herself a cup of lemonsweet without touching any of the drinks. It amused Roose to witness the looks of perplexment and fear on the faces of the other noblemen that had gathered around the table to break their fast. There were seven of them, ranging in rank from lord of a masterly house to second sons of second sons. All were outranked by him and his lady. Wynne poured him a cup of water and muffled a yawn in the palm of one gloved hand before she took a sip from her own cup. It seemed that she no longer cared whether she unnerved other people. Not if she could use that against them.

“I asked each of the principal northern lords for half a dozen men,” she informed them, “one to represent them, one to bear their banners in a show of support, and four to bear witness in case any of the others were to die. Instead,” she glanced from her uncle to the Masters of Deepwood Motte and Torrhen’s Square, “you sent me half a hundred men each. If I had expected men like you to heed the words of a lady, I would’ve been quite disappointed. Alas, a woman cannot be disappointed by men whom she expected nothing from. So now that we’re here, in the final stages of the negotiations between the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros and those who call themselves the free folk from beyond the Wall, you will keep your mouths shut while I speak with Mance Rayder. I do not expect most of you to trust me, but I will not have you ruin something that I’ve been planning for almost half a year. If you cannot remain silent,” she flailed one hand at the pink tent flap, “then I suggest you leave.”

Wendel guffawed as the Umbers grumbled. “Why ever would I leave when things are about to get interesting, my lady?” he said before he speared a piece of fish and popped the morsel into his mouth.

Roger smiled at his niece, thin and feral. “We are blood, Wynnie,” he said quietly, “and your mother is my favorite of all our siblings. Surely you do not distrust _me_.”

Wynne arched her eyebrows at him. Roose knew she trusted the Ryswells to an extent, but she was much too cautious to ever blindly trust anyone. “Shall I tell Uncle Rickard that?” she asked.

Roger smiled wider. “If you do, neither you nor I will ever hear the end of it.”

Unlike his twin, Rickard Ryswell was annoyingly loud, and like their sister, he never forgave or forgot a slight. No matter how petty. Roose had fostered their youngest brother at the Dreadfort before Domeric was born. _My own namesake_, he thought. _I do not miss him_.

“Lord Stark trusts you enough to let you speak for him,” Galbart Glover said, “and for the North. How can I do otherwise?”

Helman Tallhart reluctantly nodded in agreement. “Aye.”

“Why should I?” Arnold scoffed. “You’re nothing but an uptight bitch with ideas far above your station who thinks she can simply buy the sort of respect a lord commands—”

Roose drew his flaying knife with almost inhuman speed and held the blade to his throat; his elbow pinned the younger man facedown on the table by the back of his neck while he twisted one of his arms behind his back with the other. It was child’s play to subdue him, so easy he sneered in contempt and shook his head. “Not another word,” he leaned down and whispered in his softest, cruelest voice.

At that moment, the heir to Winterfell flipped open the pink tent flap and stepped inside with the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, the Mormont girl, the crow prince with his dragon perched upon his shoulders, the twins and their direwolves. “What did we miss?” Robb asked once he took in his surroundings.

Roose smoothed all of the expression out of his face and let his prey go. Although he was loath to let anyone speak to his wife like that, Wynne had been called much worse than an uptight bitch. _I know firsthand how uptight she isn’t_, he thought and suppressed a smirk at that. “Nothing,” he answered.

Wynne uttered a most unladylike snort at that bald-faced lie while Arnold skulked out through the tent flap, but it was drowned out by the blasts from a ranger’s horn.

“Two blasts for wildlings,” Aegon said as Qhorin Halfhand entered the tent and stood behind where the Lord Commander was seated. “Mance is here.”

Wynne took a bite of her fish and chewed daintily more out of highly ingrained habit than anything else as the King beyond the Wall approached the pink war tent. Mance had three-and-twenty vassals, although they would probably object to being called such: the Lord of Bones, mocked as Rattleshirt because the bones he wore rattled when he moved. Harma Dogshead, the commander of the wildling army. Styr, the Magnar of Thenn. Leira, better known as Mother Mole, whose people lived underground where the earth sheltered them all from the harshest winters. Tormund Giantsbane, a man of many titles who, unbeknownst to them, was the father of all five Mormont girls.

Borroq, a skinchanger whose bond creature was a giant boar. Varamyr Fiveskins, another beastling. Brogg, whose clan was called Stonemaul. Alfyn Crowkiller, an infamous raider. Blind Doss, whose senses had sharpened to compensate for his lack of vision. Devyn Sealskin and the Great Walrus, men of the Frozen Shore. Kyleg of the Wooden Ear, so named because he ate black wood ear mushrooms at every meal.

Howd the Wanderer and the Weeping Man, called the Weeper, notorious for stealing women from the northern mountains and blinding the ones he left behind to grieve the loss of their sisters and daughters. Gavin the Trader, who had set up trading posts throughout the land beyond the Wall and revolutionized the commerce of the wilderness. Soren Shieldbreaker, a famous warrior who wielded a great battle axe. Harle the Huntsman and Harle the Handsome, twin brothers who both had a son with the same woman and hated each other because the woman loved one of them but not the other.

Gerrick Kingsblood, who claimed he was descended from Raymun Redbeard, the King beyond the Wall who invaded the North during the reign of Maekar the Anvil only to die at the hand of the implacable Artos Stark. Morna, a warrior witch who wore a white mask carved from weirwood. Ygon Oldfather, a man with eighteen wives, half of whom he stole on raids; among them was Corin Umber, the daughter Mors Crowfood had lost almost three decades ago. Mag Mar Tun Doh Weg, a giant chieftain known as Mag the Mighty.

Mance hadn’t brought them all with him because he knew better than to put all his eggs in the same basket. If these negotiations were a ruse, they would be a golden opportunity for assassinations. Wynne had half a mind to eliminate certain wildling leaders: Harma Dogshead, who killed a dog once a fortnight to make a macabre banner. Craster, who married his daughters against their will and sacrificed the sons they bore him to the Others in the dead of night. Ygon Oldfather, whose youngest bride was a girl of twelve. Varamyr Fiveskins, who sent his shadowcat to stalk the women he wanted and raped them once they had come to him until he grew bored of using them as meat holes and sent them away; he kept hanks of their hair as trophies, and he thought he wasn’t doing anything wrong because he didn’t beat or kill the women. Only raped them. As though being violated wasn’t a hideous form of violence.

It wasn’t as though noblemen in the Seven Kingdoms hadn’t done worse. Their king himself had, and her own husband was a raper and a flayer of men. Petyr Baelish. Gregor Clegane. Tywin Lannister. Walder Frey. Homegrown monsters who had put down roots that ran deep. Wynne herself was quite monstrous, and she was reluctant to let wildlings put down roots in her land. Even though she doubted they would survive the onslaught of inhuman monsters that would invade the Seven Kingdoms when the Long Night returned with a vengeance.

This was a necessary evil. Better to use them as battlefield fodder on the front line of the prophesized War for the Dawn than leave the wildlings at the mercy of the Others. Especially since the Night King would gladly use them against her.

Roose took the hand she wasn’t using to delicately stab pieces of fruit with her fork and interlaced her gloved fingers with his as her stomach twisted in anticipation.

When he smiled at her, her insecurities dissolved like smoke in the wind and Wynne almost believed that everything would be all right. How terrifying it was to be so deeply in love.


	34. Battle of the Haunted Forest {IX}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 2**  
Chapter 9: Battle of the Haunted Forest {IX}
> 
> After the negotiations end and the treaty is signed, the northern delegation must return to the Wall. Others lurk between them and Castle Black, waiting for nightfall.

**Don’t be afraid**   
**of your monsters.**   
**Swallow them**   
**while they are living**   
**and endure the burning**   
**in your throat.**

Zoë Lianne, “Beasts”

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅩⅤⅠⅠⅠ ❧**

298 AC

_At Whitetree, a small village northwest of Castle Black, in the Haunted Forest, in the wilderness beyond the Wall_

* * *

Mance Rayder was underwhelming in the flesh: he was a slender man of middling stature, neither remarkably tall nor short, with a sharp face, shrewd brown eyes, a mouth with lines at the corners that spoke of a propensity for laughter, his dark brown hair worn long and gone mostly grey, dressed in wool and leather underneath a ragged cloak patched with faded red silk. Not what one might expect of a King beyond the Wall. Roose knew better than to underestimate him, however. Appearances could be deceiving. Mance had united the wildlings under his rule, and he couldn’t have done that unless he was formidable enough to slay any enemies who challenged his kingship and charismatic enough to inspire true loyalty in people who prided themselves on being as wild and free as the vast wilderness that sustained them.

Through her hand in his and her thigh against his, he felt his wife settle into her seat and go still as she often did when they were hunting and she had their prey within her range. Wynne knew she had the upper hand. Mance was here to save his people from being slaughtered by the Others. These negotiations were a mere formality, the signing of a treaty in front of witnesses on both sides of a cold war to symbolize the end of ancient hostilities.

Wynne’s ever-present anxiety stemmed from the risk posed by the journey beyond the Wall itself. Not knowing whether she possessed the magical stamina to cast the same protection spell every night for a sennight. Fear of being vulnerable to attack by inhuman monsters with every reason to want her dead. Or worse. Now that anxiety was nowhere to be seen. It was overshadowed by her sheer presence—the eldritch seeming of a greenseer who comported herself as though she were comfortable in her own skin and confident in her godlike power. Only someone who knew her inside and out would be able to see through her ruse.

This was quite a feat his wife had accomplished, even if she was most certainly right when she predicted the fragile peace she had brokered would fall apart before the Long Night fell again. It had taken plenty of cleverness and coin to make this come to pass. Roose’s chest swelled with pride as five wildlings sat on the other side of the table and Mance unwrapped a parcel of bannock made of barley meal. Everyone partook of the campfire bread and salt the king had brought, in accordance with the laws of hospitality that were held sacred to the First Men. Robb, Jon and Aly dropped chunks of salted bread for their direwolves. Aegon burned a piece in the brazier, sprinkled the slice with a generous pinch of salt, then fed half to Vermithora and half to Eliandra while the wildlings all stared at the creatures in amazement because none of them had seen dragons before. It tasted like peasant fare.

Wynne unrolled four pieces of vellum, each inscribed with the peace treaty that she had negotiated with Mance for months prior to this gathering in black ink. It was stamped with the royal seal, the Hand’s seal, the black crow of the Night’s Watch, the direwolf of the Starks, the soaring falcon of the Arryns, the leaping silver trout of the Tullys, the rampant lion of the Lannisters, the prancing stag of the Baratheons, the blooming rose of the Tyrells, the sun and spear of the Martells, even the kraken of the Greyjoys. Wynne had sent her fastest raven to every Warden and every Lord Paramount. Now, with the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch to witness, the King beyond the Wall signed his name.

“Free folk don’t follow a family name or little cloth animals sewn on tunics,” Mance said. “They don’t care how you style yourself or who your grandsire was. They follow strength. They follow me.”

Roger glanced at his niece before he said, “They’ll follow you beneath the Wall.”

“Aye,” Mance agreed. It had taken some inveigling to convince him that fighting the Others was more foolish than brave. There were times when the line between foolishness and bravery was as thin as a whisper, but Mance was cunning enough to know the difference. Or his queen was, because in the end she was the one who convinced him.

“I warn you,” Lord Commander Mormont said gruffly. “Those who are not subject to the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms will not be protected under the laws of the Seven Kingdoms.”

“Meaning we still don’t have to follow your laws once we’re on the other side of the Wall,” the earless man who had accompanied his king growled.

Wynne hummed again, the noise sharper now. “True,” she conceded, “but it also means that you can and will be executed with impunity for anything I deem unacceptable. I am the first greenseer born in the North in three centuries, Magnar of Thenn. Nothing you do will go unseen by the gods, or by me. If you break the treaty and betray the North, I will skinchange into a murder of crows and peck your eyes out of your skull one by one before I pull out your entrails and hang them from trees like garlands.”

“If you think my dear cousin’s threats are idle,” Wendel said, the plump knight not seeming at all perturbed by her vile threats, “look beyond the borders of the Gift.”

“Last Hearth to the south,” Karlon Umber said, “the northern mountains in the east.”

“Umbers, Wulls, Flints, Norreys, Harclays, Burleys, Knotts and Liddles,” said his brother Harlon, “whose daughters and sisters and wives men like the Weeping Man have stolen and raped and killed and blinded.”

“These men are the northern lords whom your sons and daughters will serve as pages and squires and cupbearers,” Aegon said. “Hostages taken because we know how deep and red the blood runs between your people and mine.”

“_Blood_,” quorked the raven that perched on Mormont’s shoulder.

Roose smiled, thin and sharp. Two hundred boys and girls between the ages of eight and sixteen would be wards of the North, the sons and daughters and brothers and sisters of wildling chiefs and captains. Hostages taken to ensure the loyalty of their clansmen. Roose had spoken with the chiefs of the northern mountains and offered to turn their bitterest enemies among the wildlings over to them once they violated the terms of the treaty. Brandon Norrey and Torghen Flint were eagerly awaiting the treachery of the Weeping Man. “Those who break the treaty won’t live to regret it,” he uttered in a soft voice devoid of emotion. “Nor will their children.”

“Free folk and kneelers are more alike than not,” said one of the spearwives, “the women are women and the men are men no matter what side of the Wall we were born on. Good men and bad, heroes and villains, men of honor, cravens, liars, brutes…we have plenty. As does the Seven Kingdoms.”

Wynne cocked her head in concession. “I could not agree more,” she murmured. “I don’t believe your men will break the treaty because they’re wildlings. I believe they’ll betray me because that is what men do.”

“Har!” a broad man clad in black ringmail and massive golden armbands engraved with runes chortled and reached for a roasted ptarmigan with one huge thick-fingered hand. “Well met, Bride o’ Trees.”

Roose smiled more to himself than at anyone as Wynne squeezed his fingers before she conjured a piece of parchment into her other hand and unfurled it. Despite what she had claimed, he would not betray her trust. Never. “This is a map of the Gift,” she explained. “I marked where ore and gems can be found, where the water sources are, where game can be found, where the best farmland is, and where you should put your livestock out to pasture.”

Each wildling tribe or clan would receive a breeding pair of swine, cows, sheep, chickens, goats, and horses. Not high-quality warhorses, but draft horses best suited for plowing and mares for riding. Those who already had livestock wouldn’t receive more animals. It was expected that animals would be traded like any other commodity until flocks and herds formed. Maester Tybald was to remain at the Dreadfort while Maester Uthor assisted Mance. Although the wildlings had their own woodswitches and wise men, most had little knowledge of the land south of the Wall beyond raiding. Nomadic foraging and bucolic settling were two very different ways of life.

Roose was pleasantly surprised that everyone on their side of the table had kept their mouths shut, especially Robb Stark. Alas, it didn’t take very long before Wynne had to empty her bladder. Roose fought the urge to escort his wife out of the tent and turned his attention back to the court of wildlings: the broad man in ringmail was Tormund Giantsbane, who styled himself as Tall-talker, Horn-blower, Breaker of Ice, Thunderfist, Husband to Bears, Mead-king of Ruddy Hall, Speaker to Gods and Father of Hosts. Styr, the earless Magnar of Thenn, was half a lord and half a god to his people. Dalla, the Queen beyond the Wall, had been accompanied by her sister Val. Whilst the queen wore ermine and wolfskin, the princess wore a white bearskin cloak, but they had both dressed in fur-lined leather tunics and woolen breeches tucked into leather boots. Their golden hair was braided, and they were both armed to the teeth, lovely and most certainly lethal.

“Where is my uncle?” Robb asked, blue eyes blazing as he snarled at the King beyond the Wall. “What have you done with Benjen Stark?”

* * *

Benjen was brought to Robb in the morning as they prepared to depart Whitetree. Mance had gone before dawn, at twilight when the rising sun would protect him and his wildlings from the monsters in the Haunted Forest. Benjen wasn’t the only ranger that had been taken prisoner. There were other hostages that would only be returned once the wildlings had passed beneath the Wall, whose release had been negotiated for along with the peace treaty. Benjen was even gaunter than she remembered him being during his last visit to Winterfell; his face was a mountain crag, his long dark hair was lank and unwashed, his blue-grey eyes devoid of laughter. Aly frowned at the faint tingle of recognition that passed through her at the sight of the small bald man in a shadowskin cloak who had her uncle in chains. It was nothing like the niggling twinge of recognition that had accompanied the King beyond the Wall, one that had made her think she might’ve seen Mance Rayder somewhere before.

_This man is a skinchanger_, she thought.

Jon went as taut as a bowstring. Ghost silently bared his fangs, whilst Sable growled a warning and Grey Wind snarled as his hackles rose. Aly felt the fraught astriction in his muscles as tension wove through her own body, her skin too tight beneath the layers of wool and fur she wore, her jaw threatening to clench. Robb stiffened beside him at the strange awareness that accompanied the unknown beastling. Aly crouched and kept a hand on Sable’s ruff, her other hand on Dark Sister’s hilt beneath her heavy fur cloak.

This grey-faced man stared at her direwolf pup the way Aly had seen men look at women, as though she were a thing he wanted to take for himself. _Varamyr Fiveskins_, she thought. Wynne had warned her that he would be the wildling skinchanger most likely to covet a direwolf, for he had a pack of three wolves under his thrall. Then his eyes turned eldritch white, but it wasn’t Sable whose skin he attempted to change into—it was Vermithora’s. Unlike other beasts, dragons were difficult to skinchange into. Their innate magic protected them to a point, but greenseers were powerful enough to skinchange into dragons and that had kept the Valyrian dragonlords from conquering Westeros during the fabled Age of Heroes. Frostfyre, Steelsong, and Proudwing had only permitted Aly to inhabit their skin because they loved and trusted her; Steelsong had been reluctant to permit Jon to skinchange into his mind and body for months, even though he had chosen Jon as his rider. Vermithora shrieked indignantly at Varamyr. Aly whirled to see Wynne fix the man with a glare so vicious it made her blood run cold.

Vermithora took flight and _roared_. Aly shivered at the sound, her breath sharp in her throat as she inhaled and gasped. Wynne held up one gloved hand and clawed her fingers into her palm to snap his neck before her dragon unleashed a barrage of vivid green flame that poured out of her mouth, his skin blackening and peeling from his skull as the snow that surrounded his body melted away in the heat generated by the dragonfire. Aly forced herself to watch as his eyes bulged and burst in their sockets even as her throat constricted and her stomach roiled at the horrid smell of burning flesh pervading her nose until she could almost taste it.

_This is what dragonfire can do_, she thought, _what the dragons I hatched will do when we go to war_.

It made her sick, even though some draconic part of her saw the beauty in the flame. Robb clenched his jaw while Jon stood, numb. Vermithora looked at Wynne as if to ask her, _are you going to eat that?_ Affrighted whispers rose around them, mingling with the plumes of viridian smoke.

“How—” Robb swallowed hard, his voice horror-struck. “How could you do that?” her brother asked.

Wynne sighed and cradled her gravid belly in one gloved hand as the whispers quieted so the men who followed her into the wild might hear her answer. “Because now everyone will know that my threats from yesterday were not idle,” she explained, “and thousands of lives depend on them knowing that. If I can prevent the death of hundreds or thousands by making an example of one man who broke guest right and tried to take Vermithora against her will, then I will do what I must.”

_Someday_, Lord Stark had told her brothers, _justice will fall to you. When that day comes you must take no pleasure in the task, but neither must you look away. Rulers who hide behind paid executioners soon forget what death is_.

Northmen in heavy furs and brothers in black cloaks bore silent witness. One of the men-at-arms from Barrowton whispered, “let she who passes the sentence be the one who swings the sword.”

Lord Bolton was grinning a bone-chillingly wide grin when he opened the cage of ravens brought from the Dreadfort. One hopped out to perch on his forearm. “Tell Mance Rayder that Varamyr Fiveskins was executed because he broke guest right and violated the terms in the treaty,” he said, as though the bird could understand him.

Wynne shut the cage and locked it with a flick of her fingers. “Meet us back at Castle Black,” she added before the raven took flight. “Maester Aemon will take care of you until we return.”

Aly flinched at the gesticulation and swallowed hard again. Vermithora was sucking the scorched flesh off Varamyr’s bones, emitting a noise that sounded almost like a cat’s purr. Wynne tilted her chin in a recalcitrant manner. It was Aly who looked away first, her stomach twisting. Their father had brought Jon to witness his first execution when they were seven, while she and her sisters had remained at Winterfell. Aly loved and hated Eddard Stark in equal measure for sheltering her from the hard choices a ruler had to make.

Benjen laughed bitterly. “Good riddance,” he said and mustered a smile for his niece and nephews as Ser Jaremy wrapped a clean black cloak around him, the heavy wool lined with thick warm fur to melt the frost that had clung to the leathers and black roughspun wool he wore. Mance or some other wildling had taken his cloak, the emblem of the Night’s Watch, from him. It was Robb who warmly wrapped their long-legged uncle in a hug. Jon and Aly did the same, despite the chill that encroached on them. It was thawed by sheer relief that he was safe and sound. Qhorin Halfhand brought him accoutrements that weren’t laced with frost, and soon he was ahorse with the other rangers—and then he was home.

* * *

_At a campground in the Haunted Forest three days away from Castle Black, in the wilderness beyond the Wall_

* * *

After they made camp at sundown, Aly waited until Lord Bolton left his tent to confer with his fellow northmen and sought Wynne out. Somehow, in the months since their first meeting in raven feathers and in the flesh, Aly had forgotten how dangerous her friend was. Wynne had spent most of her life studying magic in secret, afraid for her life should the wrong person learn the truth of her and do her harm.

It wasn’t considered murder in the eyes of the law if a skinchanger was killed, no moreso than slaughtering a cow or a sheep or a pig would be. Wynne had all the rights granted to her by her lord husband as his wife, but arguably she did not have the rights of a citizen of the Seven Kingdoms in spite of how high her birth was. It was no small wonder that she made a habit of vigilance, or that she responded to every threat with ruthless efficiency, or that sometimes even her friends were frightened of her. Wynne had always been afraid, and thus she became something to fear.

Wynne sat on her feather pallet, nestled in blankets and furs. In the firelight that fumed out of the brazier, her face was overcast with shadows that sharpened her soft features as Sable ambled onto the pallet and sniffed her. Wynne sighed as she hunched over to pet the pup, who let her stroke her under her chin and from the black top of her head to her ruff. Aly felt somewhat less fearful of Wynne because Sable was unafraid and she trusted her direwolf’s instincts. “Something inside of me is broken,” Wynne murmured. “I know not if that piece was missing since I was born, or whether it shattered when all of history was dumped into my mind. What I do know,” she furled and unfurled the fingers of her other hand anxiously as Aly watched her avert her eyes almost as though she were ashamed, “is that I cannot mend it, but I can kill and feel nothing. I also know that I _should_ feel guilt or remorse, because I know every life has value from the highest to the lowest. All life matters. I also know that I will never stop choosing to save my own life at the expense of others, if I must. There is no way to live a life without pain, be it causing it or suffering it. I cannot avoid causing pain, but I can attempt to ensure that I only do minimal damage to the world around me.”

Aly yearned to see the world that lay beyond the walls of Winterfell, but Wynne had seen the world in all its glory—and in all its horror. There was a cynical sort of wisdom that bled into her voice and made her sound much older than seventeen, albeit on the cusp of turning eighteen. “Maesters call it the cold equation,” Aly said, “if the loss of a single life saves many, then taking that one life is a necessary evil.”

Wynne heaved an abyssal sigh suffused with bone deep exhaustion, her shoulders slumped with the weight of her weariness. “I pretended the best way to avoid causing pain was to simply do nothing, so that no one would look at me as you are now, as though all you see is a monster. It wasn’t only the magic that I was hiding. It was _me_,” she muttered ruefully and twisted her gloved fingers together. “It was that brokenness, but I can no longer hide from myself and I cannot turn back. Those who choose the past over the future are doomed. I will be a monster, if I must…if that is the only way to survive.”

_Mad King Aerys believed he would rise again from the flames and become a dragon after he burned King’s Landing to ashes with the wildfire his pyromancers concocted_, Wynne had told her during one of their conversations by candlelight, _Aerion the Monstrous drank a cup of wildfire because he believed it would transform him into a dragon. Those delusions were rooted in ancestral memory, since the first dragonlords of Valyria were dragon shapechangers. When people say ‘the blood of the dragon,’ they aren’t only waxing poetic or speaking metaphorically_.

Aly exhaled in a soft gust that belied the storm brewing inside of her. Whenever she wished she could tell Jon or Robb or Arya or Bran about her dragons, she reread the stories of brave knights who valiantly slayed the dragons who guarded towers with princesses locked away inside to steel her resolve to keep her secret. Those stories had a moral that children were meant to learn from reading them, and the moral was that dragons were beasts for gallant men to slay. Or that princesses could not tame the dragons and save themselves. Aly knew better, and she was as much a skinchanger as Wynne and as much a beastling as each and every one of her siblings, if not moreso. There had been a dragon sleeping within her and now that beast was awake. _Some tales say a dragon is a monster_, she thought, _if that’s so, then I’m a monster too_. “I do see a monster when I look at you,” Aly said, “but I also see my friend, and that makes you _my_ monster.”

“I am.” Wynne looked at Aly over her shoulder and smiled, one corner of her lips curling up shyly before the other followed suit. “I had no choice but to become this, in order to play the most dangerous game. Gods willing, you will never have to choose.”

* * *

_At a campground in the Haunted Forest half a day’s ride away from Castle Black, in the wilderness beyond the Wall_

* * *

On their last night beyond the Wall, the Others attacked.

Wynne had begun to hope no such attack was forthcoming, but hope wasn’t enough to lull her into a false sense of security. Fear crept through her, lacing her blood with ice. Snaps of bowstrings and the shrieks of bolts filled the air, along with the cries of havoc and clangs and cracks of blades clashing with the bones of wights. When she emerged from her sleigh the forest smelled odd, dark and sunless like the updraft from the bottom of a deep ravine.

Roose had drawn his bow and he was shooting arrows with obsidian arrowheads into the mass of rotting bodies that had surrounded them; he was masterful with his dragonbone longbow, shooting two arrows at a time and hitting two wights more often than not. One shot was enough to fell these foot soldiers with obsidian arrowheads.

Wynne opened her third eye and saw half a dozen Others among thousands of wights, some waiting for their foot soldiers to thin the ranks of the living while others had joined the fray. Aly stood with her twin, back to back with Dark Sister drawn, its blade gleaming in the moonlight as she cut down three wights in one swing. Jon wielded two obsidian daggers while Robb struck with a spear fashioned with a dragonglass spearhead, with Benjen at his back wielding the obsidian daggers Robb had brought. Aly stabbed one of the Others in the heart whilst Jon kept its blade of ice locked between his daggers, and thousands of wights fell as the creature who reanimated them was felled.

In the snow, corpses had begun to pile up. Hundreds of the men had fallen, northmen and black brothers alike, only to rise again. Until the Others were extinguished.

Aegon wielded Longclaw, the ancestral blade of House Mormont. Lord Commander Mormont was dead at his feet, his throat pierced by a javelin made of ice thrown by one of the Other; he rose again with his eyes frosted over as his murderer swung the spear that had been stained with his blood at the crow prince. Aegon slew the white walker who came for him and it fractured into ruptured ice that glinted in his silver hair.

Lyra struck down the wight that had been her uncle with the obsidian spike embedded in the hilt of her morningstar, her tears freezing into streaks of ice on her cheeks as her eyes turned eldritch white and bears with black fur came roaring out of the dark to rend the dead men that surrounded her.

Wynne herself was surrounded by all manner of wild birds who kept the wights from putting her in mortal peril with their raucous calls and sharp talons and frenzied wingbeats. Eliandra was curled in the hood of the prince’s cloak, hiding because she was only a week old and too young to breathe fire. Vermithora stayed in the sleigh as Wynne had instructed her to do by skinchanging into her mind.

In her periphery, the Night King watched her from afar with blue eyes like dead ice. Wynne shivered violently, his primordial gaze chilling her to the marrow of her bones. Then his phantom form stood before her, reaching out for her.

Wynne knew he was a shade visible only by the sight of her third eye, but those frighteningly cold hands of his felt so real when they wrapped around her throat and squeezed hard enough to smother all the air in her lungs from thousands of leagues away. In his grip, frost bit at her skin through her cloak and high fur-lined collar as she choked and wheezed and clawed ineffectually at the backs of his hands with her gloved fingers.

Dread overwhelmed her, shards of fear as thick as thorns piercing her veins as her vision began to fade and fray at the edges. This was a curse in the skin of a dead man, his flesh kept alive by the godhood that had taken root in what remained of his heart. Nothing human was left of him. Only bitter cold and death and rage, black as night.

Wynne squeezed her eyelids shut and looked deep within for green amidst the amaranthine black, the elemental power of the ancient trees in the primeval forest that resonated with the arcane power in her bones and bolstered her against the cold. Something cracked behind her eyelids like a tree struck by lightning in a storm, raw magic coalescing around her with desperate ferocity as the mark of his fingers on her flesh seared into her skin. Wynne struggled to breathe as she opened her eyes and saw his shade was gone, his grip on her throat a nightmare she forced herself to awaken from.

Then she felt the migraine taking root in her back teeth and gritted them as phosphenes blared bright behind her eyelids, pain blinding her flesh and blood eyes while the panoptic vision of her third eye overwhelmed her. Wynne swallowed back the bile that rose up beneath her tongue and dug her palms into her eyes underneath her eyeglasses in a futile attempt to staunch the agony.

Roose caught her as her knees buckled, their sons moving wildly inside her as her pulse roared in her ears. “They’re dead,” he told her softly. “All of them. Well and truly dead.”

“Just six of them,” Wynne rasped, her mouth dry and her eyeglasses askew. _There are more_, she thought. _Thousands more in the Land of Always Winter slowly but surely marching south to invade the North. This wasn’t a real battle. It was merely the Night King showing me how powerless I am compared to him without the Wall in between us. This wasn’t a real battle, and still more than half the people we brought with us were slaughtered like sheep_.


	35. A Woman’s War {I}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 2**  
Chapter 10: A Woman’s War {I}
> 
> Roose and Wynne return to the Dreadfort and prepare for the birth of their sons. Meanwhile, Sansa lights a glass candle and uncovers a secret.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In celebration of 10,000 hits, here’s an update! Thank you so much for reading. This is such a self-indulgent fic that I _never_ thought it would get so much readership, but here we are. There are three chapters in the can (all over 8,000 words each), so I’ll be updating on the seventeenth and on Halloween before I go back on hiatus. YEET.
> 
> GRRM was interviewed by _Rolling Stone_, and he said: “This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. _Lord of the Rings_ had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine?” Then he didn’t tell us what the Seven Kingdoms’ tax policies are, so I wrote my own.
> 
> I also quote _Trickster’s Queen_ by Tamora Pierce, specifically a snippet from an in-universe book titled _Advice to Young Noblewomen_. Which is referenced explicitly in the text, but: credit where credit is due. I sometimes regret my decision to write this fic without annotating it.

**Maybe she would absorb some of the darkness, which might not be darkness at all but only knowledge. She would turn into a woman others came for advice. She would be called in emergencies. She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing that had to be done.**

Margaret Atwood, “Monopoly”

* * *

**☙ ⅩⅩⅠⅩ ❧**

298 AC

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

After the onslaught the singers had dubbed the Battle of the Haunted Forest, the remnants of the northern delegation spent the night at Castle Black. Some of the men had stayed behind whilst the Boltons departed the next morning at dawn, because the wounded remained under the care of the stewards of the Night’s Watch and Maester Aemon. Those who doubted the Others had returned or had doubted the fact of their existence knew better now, but it had cost hundreds of lives. Beyond the Wall, pyres blazed for a fortnight as the bodies of the wights and of the slain were burned according to wildling custom. Among the slain were Karlon Umber and Larence Snow, the bastard of Hornwood, a boy only a year older than Sansa. Six hundred seven-and-fifty men had fallen prey to the Others, whilst three hundred five-and-twenty men lived to tell the ghastly tale. Aegon was unanimously elected Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch upon his return to Castle Black, the hilt of Longclaw forged into the head of a dragon by Donal Noye. Within the week, Mance had led his people through the Wall and into the Gift.

It took another month for them to reach the fork where the Redroad branched off from the Kingsroad, while the Starks and their direwolves had flown on dragonback and thus returned to Winterfell in less than half a day. Wynne had slumbered for a fortnight in the wheelhouse, sustained only by a mixture of honey and water and herbs whilst she recovered from magic burnout. Not even her sons quickening tore her from this deep and dreamless sleep. Bloodraven had kept an eye on the wildlings for her while she had slumbered.

When she awoke, she was _ravenous_. Roose fed her eggs and fish and stew and campfire bread whilst she valiantly struggled to keep her eyelids open because she was too sluggish to stay awake for more than half an hour at a time. Wynne hadn’t even touched a weirwood tree in weeks because she felt so exhausted. Roose ordered her to remain in the wheelhouse unless she needed to make water because he feared she would go into preterm labor if she overexerted herself, but he needn’t have worried. Even though she began to experience cramping and false labor pains during their journey home, her amniotic sac hadn’t ruptured.

Vermithora had outgrown the wheelhouse before they reached the Redroad, her wingspan growing wider as her legs and neck and tail had grown thicker and longer. Soon the dragonling measured six feet long from snout to tail and she was capable of snatching up a hundred-pound goat in her claws, but she was failing to grasp the reality that she could no longer be carried and cuddled like a baby or drape herself over the shoulders of anyone whom she thought would make a good perch.

When the wheelhouse rolled into the castle town surrounding the Dreadfort, Wynne saw that a wall of thick red stone now stood twelve feet high around the castle town. Mortar and clay that had been mixed with obsidian dust sparkled in the sunlight as Vermithora took wing and soared over the wall into the firmament. When the Others breached the Wall, the army of the dead would not be able to attack the Dreadfort or the castle town.

In the outer courtyard stood Domeric, Sansa, and Lady Barbrey, who held herself tall and proud as the servants and guardsmen and men-at-arms all bowed or knelt to welcome them back home. Those who served House Bolton when Robar was Lord of the Dreadfort spoke manually rather than verbally. Domeric wore the coat of black ringmail he always wore to spar over grey breeches and black leather boots, whilst Sansa wore a gown of grey silk with a pink sheen to the fabric over a richly embroidered pink kirtle, with the small grey direwolf pup she had named Lady sitting beside her with impeccable lupine posture.

After everything she went through beyond the Wall, the sight of her lady mother in her woolen widow’s weeds and greying brown hair braided into a regal semblance of a crown made Wynne feel as though she were a little girl again for a fleeting moment. _I have not been that girl for over a decade_, she thought ruefully, _and soon I will be a mother too_.

“Mother,” Wynne greeted as Roose took her hand in his own and helped her step out of the wheelhouse, her swollen ankles protesting most vehemently. Domeric gallantly went to take her other hand as she winced and squeezed her fingers gently as the smallfolk rose to their feet and resumed their duties.

Lady Barbrey kept her hands clasped in front of her because it would be unseemly to embrace her daughter now, her eyes crinkling at the corners as her smile unfurled. In those pale blue eyes was potent and powerful relief. Wynne had done something unprecedented. No woman of the North had ever before gone beyond the Wall and returned alive. “Welcome back, sweetling,” she said.

Roose brought her hand to his lips and kissed the heel of her palm while he arched his eyebrows at her mother. Then he bent and tilted her chin up so he could kiss her mouth, quick and possessive. “I’ll come to you in your chambers at dinner,” he whispered to her, his breath hot on her lips, “but for now I have duties that I must attend to.”

Lady Barbrey huffed. “Roose is only dutiful when it suits him,” she proclaimed, her voice equal parts reproachful and fond. Before their affair and after, her mother and Roose were friends, inasmuch as either of them could be friends with anyone. Although she highly doubted either of them would call what they had a friendship rather than a mutually beneficial alliance, a passive-aggressive truce.

“Welcome home,” Domeric said and beamed when she turned and looked at him over her shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he added, “Sansa rode Hellebore every day whilst you were making history.”

Sansa, who _hated_ riding, flushed pink as Wynne stared at her in mild astonishment. When she witnessed Sansa riding her mare in the greenscape, she almost couldn’t believe her eyes. It had slipped her mind until now, because she was too busy worrying about what might befall her beyond the Wall.

“Hellebore is a good horse,” said Sansa as they entered the inner courtyard with her wolf at her heels, “even though she always slobbers all over the front of Domeric’s tunics.”

“That’s a horse blessing,” Lady Barbrey said, her smile widening irrepressibly. “Or so my father says.”

“My Lord Grandfather says a great many things,” Wynne deadpanned.

Servants clad in Bolton liveries opened the doors of the castle keep. Wynne thanked each of them before Domeric escorted her into the entrance hall, down a corridor and painstakingly up the winding staircase of the center tower into her chambers before he and Sansa went to bring her a snack and some tea from the kitchens. Ellara was inside, supervising the chambermaids while they unpacked her things and stoked the fire in the hearth and brought up hot water for a bath.

Wynne inhaled deeply through her nose and exhaled with her whole body as the tension that had taken root in her shoulders and back slowly began to seep out of her. _I’m home_, she thought and breathed in the scent of herbs. Bundles hung on hooks by every window and doorway, and sachets were tucked in every drawer. There were exponentially more hanging from the ceiling in her workroom, over shelves full of jars and bottles of alchemical ingredients.

Alyssum smiled and signed “Hello,” the fingers of her right hand extended with her thumb crossed over her palm as she flicked her hand away from her forehead. Salvia had assembled stacks of books and sundry knitting and sewing implements, all within reach of her featherbed. Wynne greeted them both with the flourishing hand movements for “It’s been a while” before she unceremoniously began to undress, conjuring her gown, kirtle, chemise, leggings and smallclothes into the basket left by one of the laundresses and conjuring herself a fresh chemise and smallclothes from her clothespress; her boots unlaced themselves as she unfastened her cloak and dropped the pile of furs in the basket on top of her soiled traveling clothes. This blatant arcane display made one of the chambermaids squeak in distress.

Wynne paid her no heed as she flopped onto a strategically placed red velvet couch to lie in wait for a hot bath, her swollen ankles still aching. From a young age, Wynne had learned how to behave like a lady. Or, more accurately, how to hide behind the façade of a perfect highborn girl by acting unobtrusive and downplaying her cleverness in order to avoid drawing attention to herself and thereby putting herself in peril. When people like her erstwhile suitors made the mistake of paying unwanted attention to her, she nipped that in the bud and sharpened her tongue. These days she had grown comfortable enough in her own skin that she no longer felt the need to hide. “Either get accustomed to it or get out,” she said and signed, not unkindly. “I no longer care whether I offend the delicate sensibilities of those who do not believe in magic by merely being myself.”

Lady Barbrey sat on the couch by her feet and elegantly swept her black skirts underneath her before she folded her hands in her lap and straightened her back. “Since last we saw each other,” she said imperiously, “Roose has gotten you with child, you hatched a dragon, you brokered a peace that ended over eight thousand years of war between the North and those wildling savages beyond the Wall, and you won a fight against the Others that singers are immortalizing as the Battle of the Haunted Forest. Have I missed anything?”

_I went feral and ripped out a woman’s jugular with my teeth on Samhuinn after she threatened to force moon tea down my throat and murder your grandsons in the womb_, Wynne thought, but that incident wasn’t something her mother ever needed to know about. Nor did she need to know about the mark around her throat left by the Night King, concealed beneath the collar of her gown.

Lady Barbrey arched one elegant brown eyebrow. It was a look Wynne knew very well, a motherly look that said _I know when there’s something you’re not telling me_.

Wynne mustered up a smile. “I see everything and sometimes even I miss something,” she deadpanned, for she had long ago mastered the fine art of holding a conversation in which no vital information was imparted.

Lady Barbrey smiled back with only a hint of bitterness hidden in one corner of her lips and reached out to run soft fingertips over her cheek. “My precious girl,” she said, “your father would be so proud of you. I may disagree with some of the choices you’ve made, but I am so proud of you…” her throaty voice caught and thickened before she asked, “…you know that, don’t you?”

Wynne felt the lump forming in her throat and swallowed in a doomed attempt to unravel it. Behind her mother’s tempestuous blue-grey eyes was a familiar sweet edge of fear mingled with the hope every good mother had for her children, hope she understood now because she felt the same for the two boys she carried inside of her. “I know,” she answered, because it was what her mother unequivocally needed to hear and because it was true. Lady Barbrey took pride in all three of her children, no matter how often her personality clashed with theirs.

Lady Barbrey had never been frightened of her daughter, but she had always been afraid _for_ Wynne. There were so many things in the world that no mother could hope to protect her daughter from.

Or her sons.

Whether the father she never knew would’ve been proud of her or not wasn’t something that she wanted to dwell on, because her father had abandoned her before she drew her first breath. Lord Willam had chosen to avenge Brandon Stark rather than remain in Barrowton with his wife—and in doing so her father had chosen the past over the future.

_I won’t make that mistake_, Wynne thought viciously, _never_.

* * *

Life at the Dreadfort had been strange with its lord and lady absent for more than four moons. Sansa understood why they had to journey beyond the Wall. It was a show of good faith, if nothing else. Mance Rayder, Wynne had said, would respect her more if she went beyond the Wall herself. Actions spoke louder than words, and putting her life on the line to bring the wildlings into the king’s peace without requiring them to bend the knee and become subject to the Iron Throne was intended to prove the strength of her character and of her convictions.

Wynne had spent almost half a year brokering the peace treaty: writing to Father, who then wrote to the Hand of the King, who then had to get royal approval from the king himself before he wrote back to Father with an official response, who then wrote back to Wynne, and so forth. One million golden dragons had paid off the crown’s debt to the Iron Bank of Braavos. Another million dragons were donated to the Night’s Watch to smooth the ruffled feathers of the brotherhood. Or “grease the wheels,” as Thea had succinctly put it. Whether they believed the Lady of the Dreadfort was mad for insisting the Others had returned or not, gold was gold—and they would not hesitate to take her money.

There had been few objections from the nobility south of the Neck, since the threat of wildling raids was merely ambiguous to them. Unlike in the North, where the wildlings had been a constant danger for centuries. Wynne had anticipated that paying off a portion of the crown’s debt would overshadow any southron objections, and she had been right. Most of the objections had been raised by the men of the Night’s Watch and by Father’s bannermen. Particularly the northern mountain clans, the Umbers, and the Karstarks. Father and Lord Commander Mormont had overruled those objections and Father had smoothed things over somewhat by offering to foster Ned Umber, his namesake and the son of Smalljon Umber, at Winterfell. Since the boy was of age with Lyanna, the Umbers could hope a match between them would come of the fostering. Lord Karstark had a maiden daughter he might have betrothed to Robb if the opportunity arose, but she was already betrothed to Daryn Hornwood. There were no Karstarks young enough to foster at Winterfell, nor were any of them suited to her younger sisters. Lady Agatha Umber was half Karstark and she was offered a place at court as lady-in-waiting to Mother, the better to entice Robb to court her if her brother so chose. Father had also promised the mountain clans permission to execute those who broke the treaty with extreme prejudice.

_We have five main political factions in the North_, Wynne had told Sansa one afternoon over tea_. Firstly, the northern mountain clans, who mine the local gemstones and metal ore from which our weapons and tools are made as well as stone from quarries and other minerals. Which has made them very wealthy, to the point that the Kings of Winter conquered them in order to gain control over those vast resources before they began to conquer the entire North. Although they are quarrelsome, each of the clans is loyal to your family. Arya Flint, your great-grandmother and your sister’s namesake, was a member of House Flint of Breakstone Hill, they who call themselves the First Flints. House Flint of Flint’s Finger and House Flint of Widow’s Watch control lands on either side of the kingdom: the Flint cliffs and Cape Kraken on the shores of Blazewater Bay and the Saltspear, and on the shores of the Shivering Sea_.

_So the Flints also control a portion of the arable land in the North_, Sansa had observed as she traced the dotted lines that Wynne had drawn meticulously on a map of the North to mark the borders in between the territories that belonged to each house in the colors of each.

_Precisely_. Wynne pointed to the Northern Mountains, then to each of the lands occupied by the cadet branches of House Flint. _These_, she pointed to Cape Kraken, _were lands that belonged to House Amber granted to the Flints by the Kings of Winter after they extinguished that family. Whereas Widow’s Watch once belonged to the Boltons, and they granted the lands to House Flint in order to deprive House Bolton of resources_.

_Because the Boltons kept rebelling against us_, Sansa had pointed out.

_Yes_, Wynne had acquiesced, _but can you blame them for that? Conquest, like pride, is never easy to swallow. Secondly_, she pointed to the Last Hearth and Karhold in the northeastern corner of the kingdom, _the Umber-Karstark-Cerwyn contingent_.

_Lord Greatjon Umber is married to Lady Sabina Karstark, whose father is Arnolf Karstark, the castellan of Karhold_, Sansa recalled, _and Lord Rickard Karstark is married to Lady Regan Umber, the second daughter of Mors Umber and cousin to the Greatjon. Lady Agnora, the second daughter of Arnolf, is married to Lord Medger Cerwyn_.

_Precisely_, Wynne had echoed. _House Cerwyn doesn’t have much land, but their weapons manufacturing techniques are second to none in the North. All of the best castle-forged steel in the North is refined at Castle Cerwyn. Cerwyn means “vat” in the Old Tongue, and one way__ to extract metal from ore with hydrometallurgy is through vat leaching. House Karstark holds the winterwood, second only to the wolfswood as a source of timber__. Which, as I am sure you know, is our main export to other kingdoms in Westeros and to cities in Essos. House Umber holds the Lonely Hills, another source of minerals and metal ore. Most of the crops that feed both House Umber and House Karstark as well as the northern mountain clans and the men of the Night’s Watch are grown on Umber and Karstark land, and game is hunted in the winterwood. Wayns are sent along the Kingsroad to Castle Cerwyn every harvest as Lady Agnora’s dowry. Thirdly_, she tapped the patch of green ink that marked the wolfswood, _the woodsmen of the wolfswood. House Glover and every house sworn to them, as well as House Tallhart_.

_House Forrester of Ironrath_, Sansa had recited from memory, _House Bole of King’s Grove, House Branch of Acorn Grove, House Moss of Grovesend, and House Woods of Greatglen. House Glover is only a masterly house, but they control the forest where the largest quantities of timber is harvested and game is hunted. House Tallhart holds Torrhen’s Square, and they refine the timber into lumber. Ser Helman Tallhart is married to Ser Wayland’s sister Lady Emeline Manderly. Leobald Tallhart, the castellan of Torrhen’s Square, is married to Lady Berena Hornwood. Galbart Glover is a widower whose lady wife died before she could give him children, and he hasn’t remarried. Robett Glover is marred to Lady Sybelle Locke, the only daughter of the Lord of Oldcastle_.

_Yes_. Wynne had nodded succinctly. _Fourthly, the crannogmen of the Neck. House Reed and every house sworn to them. Some people look down upon the crannogmen for being cowardly, but trees in the swamps of the Neck are used for timber and the bog iron can be used to make weapons and armor and peat found in those swamps can be used as fuel. We need those resources. I do not consider their battle tactics cowardly, either. It’s fighting smart rather than fighting chivalrously, and those who fight in such a manner are oft the ones who survive_.

_Lastly_, Sansa traced one fingertip around the Rills and Barrowlands to White Harbor and over the Sheepshead Hills to the Dreadfort, _the Bolton-Ryswell-Dustin-Manderly contingent. Lord Wyman Manderly was married to Lady Robyn Dustin, Lord Rodrik Ryswell is married to his twin sister Lady Wylma Manderly, their eldest daughter married the Lord of the Dreadfort and their younger daughter married the Lord of Barrowton. House Overton and House Woolfield are sworn to House Manderly, as are another ten petty lords and over a hundred landed knights. Lord Halys Hornwood is married to Lord Wyman’s cousin Lady Donella Manderly. Neither he nor Lord Ondrew Locke are sworn to House Manderly_.

_House Hornwood holds the Hornwood_, Wynne had said, _another source of timber and game. Oldcastle was once the castle that guarded the mouth of the White Knife, before your forebearers built the Wolf’s Den, hence the pair of keys on their house sigil. Now they build the ships that guard the shore from pirates who sail the Narrow Sea._

_What about my family?_ Sansa wanted to know.

_House Stark has no factions because your father is uninterested in political machinations_, Wynne informed her. _However, each of the factions is loyal to House Stark. When the Kings of Winter completed their conquest and became the Kings in the North, they became __indispensable. House Hornwood was founded by a Stark bastard fostered by House Manderly to whom his father granted holdings that had once belonged to House Bolton, House Manderly was granted the Wolf’s Den around which they built the city of White Harbor and the New Castle by House Stark, the northern mountain clans must settle disputes by calling the chiefs of the clans to Winterfell. If your family were extinguished, chaos would reign in the North. Which is something I would prefer to prevent_.

All of the ruling noble houses in the Seven Kingdoms had signed the peace treaty, and it had been passed into law. Wynne and Lord Roose had left the Dreadfort to meet a contingent of nine hundred northmen on the Kingsroad and travel up the road to Castle Black a fortnight after Sansa’s nameday. Domeric had been named acting Lord of the Dreadfort by his father, with Ser Erskine and Lord Bertram to assist him in his seigniorial duties.

Thus, Wynne’s duties as Lady of the Dreadfort had fallen to Sansa, who took on those duties graciously. Ellara, Kenna, Thea and even Jeyne helped her manage the financial side of things, because Sansa had never had much of a head for figures. There were inventories and budgets for each household office, salaries for household staff and payments for those who delivered supplies to the fortress, reordering those supplies, funds set aside to cover the costs of castle repairs and summer flooding and storm damage and crop failure, and head taxes to collect.

Septa Mordane and Maester Luwin had taught Sansa proper etiquette, reading and writing, five types of court dances, six types of southron ronde and northern reigen circle dances, fifteen embroidery stitches, the history of Westeros from the dawn of days to the present age, the lineage of every noble house in the Seven Kingdoms going back to the Conquest, how to dress in accordance with the latest fashion and to set off her auburn hair and pale complexion, how to pour a formal tea, how to play both the high harp and the bells, how to speak two other languages besides the Common Tongue, how to compose a letter in order to correspond with any sort of recipient, how to plan a menu of up to twenty courses for a feast and properly set a banquet table, how to give and decorate for a ball, and more importantly, how to resolve disputes from the most paramount to the pettiest. These had been her accomplishments before she became a ward of House Bolton. Wynne had taught her to play cyvasse, to think critically in order to form opinions of her own and express those opinions eloquently if need be, how to change her skin, and that ladyship was more than just being the wife of a lord and mistress of his keep. It was being a ruler in your own right, beholden to your people. This lesson was something her lady mother had taught her as well. _A woman can rule as wisely as any man_, she had oft insisted.

However, it was one thing to be clever and another to be wise, one thing to _know_ something and another to actually _do_ something. Sansa hadn’t found her footing until her third moonturn as the acting Lady of the Dreadfort, because it took her over three months to convince the household officers and staff that she wasn’t just a silly little girl. No one disrespected her or belittled her outright because she was the daughter of the Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, but the men tended to talk rudely over her. Domeric chided them until they stopped, but Sansa wanted them to love and respect her instead of merely tolerating her as their lady because her betrothed was the son of their lord. At least Jory was on her side—she often caught sight of him glowering at the men who interrupted her from his guardpost at her back out of the corner of her eye and it always made her smile.

_I’ll make them love me_, she avowed, _I’ll earn their respect_.

Wynne had counseled her on what she dubbed a charm offensive, being kind and sweet to win people over. It wasn’t something that she herself could do. Wynne had used her greensight to eavesdrop on their people and solve the problems they had neglected to mention to Lord Bolton—sending builders to repair buildings and refectors to fix broken things, replacing broken things deemed beyond repair, sending for glassblowers and glaziers and lenscrafters and carpetweavers and lacemakers from Myr to mitigate the cost of buying fine goods from overseas, creating a delivery service for herbal teas and medicines that offered the peasant girls from the City of Weeping a chance to train at arms and earn incomes of their own without prostituting themselves, procuring steel in order to build more subterranean grain stores in every village on Bolton lands, and increasing the incomes of the smallfolk by properly valuing labor.

This was only feasible because taxes were oft paid in kind rather than in coin. If the incomes of the smallfolk were increasing while they continued to pay the sum levied on them in ore or gems or barley or rye or butter or sheep or cattle or pigs or crabs or fish, tax rates wouldn’t rise and they would be permitted to keep a bigger portion of the money they had earned. Whereas taxes on the nobility were derived from assessments of the value of the lands and property in their demense, typically between one and two percent in peacetime—one percent to the reigning monarch, one percent to the Warden or Lord Paramount—and between three and five percent during wartime.

Lord Alton Butterwell, Master of Coin to Maegor the Cruel, had implemented something called tallage: annual land taxes levied upon the nobility that beggared those who opposed the abomination on the Iron Throne. Jaehaerys the Conciliator had outlawed tallage levies and implemented both the fixed head taxes on smallfolk and land taxes levied against the nobility. Aegon the Unworthy had proclaimed that nobility should be exempt from taxes and proceeded to deprive many of his vassals of their wealth on a whim, but Daeron the Good had righted the wrongs done by his father during his misrule and decreed that such laws could not be changed unless a Great Council was called. Thus, no Targaryen king who ruled in the last century had passed any unjust tax laws.

This meant the Lady of the Dreadfort knew how to game the system by making overseas investments to generate incomes that could not be taxed by the crown and using that money to fix anything that could be fixed with copper, silver or gold. However, she was not particularly charming.

_I am ill-suited to flattery_, Wynne had said, _but you are more charming than I could ever be. Smile like you mean it, but do not touch the men you charm or permit them to touch you. If you want men to love you as their lady, you must praise them, acknowledge their accomplishments, put them at ease in your presence, and then make them yearn for **your** approval rather than trying to please them. Never forget that you are the blood of Winterfell, nor that your high birth doesn’t make you better than anyone. It means you were born with enough privilege and influence to change your corner of the world, for good or ill_.

Sansa learned how to dye cloth and make cheese and churn butter and brew ale, even though such tasks were performed by servants. Once a week, she performed quality checks to ensure that every office was running smoothly. Wynne had watched over the household and everyone in the castle town by skinchanging, and Sansa had a flock of redstarts that agreed to lend her their little winged bodies in exchange for barberries and bilberries.

After a sennight, the redstarts began to understand human speech and they attempted to relay everything they overheard to her. Another fortnight, and they learned to differentiate between useful information and inane chatter. After a month, they could do the quality checks themselves and report back to her as Wynne’s unkindness of ravens did. This must’ve been how Lord Bloodraven had ruled the realm with spies and sorcery: with a thousand eyes, and one. Sansa had even skinchanged into her wolf and carried messages tied to Lady’s collar all over the castle. It gave more than a few of the maids and servants a fright, until they began to grow accustomed to such things.

Sansa had also learned to have conversations by candlelight using a glass candle Wynne had given her. When she lit the candle and looked westward, she could see from the Dreadfort to the hills and valleys behind the walls of Winterfell, from the arboreal colonnades of the wolfswood to the inclement water that slashed at the shores of the Sunset Sea. If the black twisted glass tapers Wynne had given to her parents and to Robb had been lit, her family appeared to her in ethereal plumes of smoke that looked solid unless she tried to touch them. When she attempted to embrace her mother, the smoke dissolved where her hands were and coalesced once she withdrew.

When she lit the candle one afternoon, Sansa had seen the dragons in the crypts beneath Winterfell. Three huge scaly creatures lurking in the cavernous dark below the statues of her ancestors that marked their graves, with Aly reading aloud from a scroll written in High Valyrian to them while Jon smiled one of his rare smiles and crouched to sit with his twin in silence devoid of solemnity.

Sansa had always thought of Aly as something of a lone wolf. For as long as she could remember, her half-sister had spent most of her time reading in the library tower or practicing with her sword in the yard or hunting with her longbow in the wolfswood. Arya envied and loved Aly fiercely and bemoaned how solitary their half-sister was, because she had oft made herself scarce. Aly rose at dawn to practice in the yard, broke her fast with Robb and Jon and Theon, and took her lunch in the library tower if she wasn’t in the woods. At the evening meal, she always sat at the edge of the table with Jon like a shield in between her and the rest of their half-siblings—and Theon—with a book or a scroll on her knee under the table that she would read unless their father or Septa Mordane told her to stop.

Aly read more voraciously than Domeric or Thea or even Wynne, and _that_ was no mean feat.

Even though Sansa had nothing in common with her half-sister but for the father they shared, she loved Aly. Sansa remembered being only three and a half, tangling her feet in the skirts of a new satin gown and tripping herself up despite her best efforts to walk gracefully. When she recalled the memory, her mind conjured the echoes of fear lurching through her as the stairs went out from underneath her. Aly caught her, steadied her, and she was so _warm_…warm enough to burn the lurch in her stomach away.

Aly smiled at her before she hunched to smooth her skirts, and Sansa had thought her half-sister looked very much like a storybook princess. Then her mother came around the corner and said,_ What do you think you’re doing with my daughter, bastard?_ Aly went stone cold and dipped her head, although not quickly enough to conceal her sneer. _Lady Stark_, her half-sister had said before she fled. Sansa had asked her mother what _bastard _meant, but Mother hadn’t answered. It took her three more years to explain to Sansa what being a bastard meant.

Sansa had once thought Arya might be a bastard too, since her sister had nothing of their lady mother in her face or her coloring. Mother had laughed at the very notion and said no, Arya was her daughter and Sansa’s trueborn sister, blood of their blood. After that, Sansa had seldom let herself wonder on whom their lord father had begotten his bastard children. It only tainted what her parents had built together since they first met in the sept at Riverrun on the morning they would be wed, and Sansa wouldn’t let some unknown common woman cast a shadow over their marriage. It was plain to see that Mother thought of Jon and Aly as the embodiments of Father’s dishonor…living, breathing reminders of the infidelity she would prefer to forget.

Aly, unlike Jon or Arya, had nothing of their father in her face or her coloring—the coloring of Old Valyria that had set her half-sister apart from the rest of them, so much so that she once bought a hair wash from Tyrosh and dyed her hair brown for a few moons before it washed out because she wanted to look more like a Stark.

Gods be true, her half-brother and sister were _dragonriders_. Wynne had to have known. There was no way a greenseer could have missed it, _and_ it explained where she got the dragon egg from which she hatched Vermithora. Sansa had assumed she bought it from an Essosi merchant, but a dragon egg would’ve cost a fortune and no such exorbitant sums had been written in her meticulous financial records. Maester Luwin had told her that Mushroom—a dwarf who served as the court fool during the reigns of Viserys the Droll, Aegon the Usurper, Rhaenyra the Half-Year Queen, and Aegon the Dragonbane—had written that Vermax clutched in the crypts beneath Winterfell during the Dance of the Dragons, when Prince Jacaerys Velayron came to treat with her ancestor Lord Cregan Stark, Lady Jeyne Arryn, and Lord Desmond Manderly on behalf of his mother. Aegon the Unlikely had visited Winterfell before he was crowned to search for that clutch with Ser Duncan the Tall and they had found nothing.

Aly obviously had found something. Which explained what a lone wolf her half-sister was. If she’d been taking care of three dragons in between meals and lessons with Ser Rodrik and Maester Luwin and Septa Mordane, it was no small wonder that she never had time to chase Bran and Rickon around the castle, or sing dirges to Lorra in the Old Tongue because only the requiems of the First Men could soothe her during her tantrums, or sit at embroidery with Sansa and Lyanna, or teach Arya how to wield a sword. Sansa had seen Vermithora eat, and Vermithora wasn’t _half_ the size of the dragons in the crypts. Aly hadn’t been searching for a white stag rumored to have been sighted in the wolfswood—she just had to keep her dragons fed so they wouldn’t try to fill their bellies with the castle staff, or the smallfolk in the Winter Town, or the peasants in the villages and fields surrounding Winterfell. Since a bastard girl who did not work had no incomes, Aly couldn’t afford to feed her dragons any other way. Father had refused when Aly told him that she wanted to become an apprentice and learn a trade in order to earn incomes of her own and support herself instead of waiting for someone to marry her. Sansa remembered being startled at seeing her quiet father wroth, and that her half-sister had sulked for months afterward.

Father had requested a royal decree of legitimacy for both of his bastard children, and Mother hadn’t even seemed to mind. Which made Sansa wonder. Father might have met a Velaryon, a Celtigar, a Vyrwel, or a dragonseed and gotten twins on her during his campaign. There were rumors about the mother of his bastard children being Lady Ashara Dayne, or a wet nurse from Starfall by the name of Wylla, or the daughter of the fisherman who drowned when they were caught by a storm on the Bite after Father had crossed the Mountains of the Moon to the Fingers and hired the fisherman to bring him to White Harbor. Father had been imprisoned on Sisterton before Lord Borrell released him so that he could return to Winterfell and call his banners.

However, the likelihood of Father being unfaithful to Mother and sullying his honor was slim. Most people only believed it was true because Jon looked every inch a Stark. However, another Stark was more likely to have borne a child with the coloring of Old Valyria. Sansa’s Aunt Lyanna, whom Father said had died of a fever…a fever that, perhaps, was _childbed_ fever.

Which prompted more questions than it answered. Had Prince Rhaegar abducted her Aunt Lyanna, or did they elope because her aunt was promised to another? If her Aunt Lyanna and Prince Rhaegar were married, then Jon and Aly weren’t her bastard half-brother and sister at all. Jon and Aly were a prince and princess of the blood.

It was rumored that Prince Jacaerys had secretly wed Sara Snow, the half-sister of Lord Cregan, before he flew south and died in the Battle of the Gullet. Mushroom had written that Prince Jacaerys had promised his firstborn daughter by Sara to Lord Rickon Stark in the Pact of Ice and Fire. Lord Rickon had eventually wed Lady Jeyne Manderly, a granddaughter of Lord Desmond. Their daughters were the Lady Serena Stark, who married her half-uncle Edric Stark and gave him four children, and Sansa’s namesake, who married her half-uncle Lord Jonnel Stark only to die without issue. Archmaester Gyldayn had refuted the testimonials of Mushroom and dismissed them as fevered imaginings, insisting that Prince Jacaerys would have never broken his betrothal to his cousin Lady Baela Targaryen to protect the virtue of a northern bastard girl. Sansa thought it would be terribly romantic if the story was true.

Sansa had resolved to ask Wynne the truth of all this before she confronted her parents or her half-brother and sister, even though it took two moonturns longer than expected for Wynne and Lord Roose to return. There was no harm in waiting, but harm could be done if she confronted them before she had all of the facts. Sansa had a pot of tea brewed and waited for Wynne to finish bathing while Lady Dustin watched her arrange the table in her daughter’s solar with tea snacks and little cakes, her narrowed blue-grey eyes not unlike a brewing storm. Lady was curled up beside her chair, and she licked her fingers with a rough tongue when Sansa bent to pet her. Sansa was able to steel herself in spite of the scrutiny she was under with her wolf by her side.

“You do everything so prettily,” Barbrey said, “Dom must love that. When he was a page, he used to polish my lord husband’s armor once a week until it shone like new even though neither I nor my master-at-arms asked him to do so. I keep the suit of armor with my husband’s shield in the entryway so your father sees it every time he visits me, to remind him that he left my husband’s bones in Dorne.”

Sansa looked up from the silver tray, its tiers filled with sandwiches. Barbrey was studying her, her gaze shrewd in a manner that was all too familiar to Sansa because her wardeness oft wore the same argute expression. Sansa hadn’t yet had the chance to converse with the Lady of Barrowton, who arrived the afternoon before her daughter had returned to the Dreadfort. However, her reputation had preceded her. “Wynne says you hate the Starks,” she said. Then she asked, “Why?”

“Because once there was nothing I wanted more than to be a Stark,” Barbrey said, her face seeming to harden with every word. “Your uncle Brandon was fostered at Barrowton with old Lord Dustin, Wynne’s grandfather, but he spent most of his time riding in the Rills. Brandon loved to ride. Lyanna took after him in that. A pair of centaurs, those two. My son is half a horse himself. Cregard took after his father, too.”

There was such fierce pride in her voice when Barbrey spoke of her only son. Brandon Stark’s only son, as far as Sansa knew. If he’d been trueborn, he would be heir to Winterfell instead of Robb; and Barbrey knew it, too. Mingled with the pride was bitterness so cold it burned.

“My own father was always pleased to play host to the heir to Winterfell,” Barbrey said. “He had great ambitions for House Ryswell. My lord father would have served me up to any Stark who happened by, but there was no need. Brandon was never shy about taking what he wanted. I still remember the look of my maiden’s blood on his cock the night he claimed me, and I think Brandon liked the sight as well. ‘A bloody sword is a beautiful thing,’ he told me. When he took me, it hurt, but it was a sweet pain…but the day I learned he was to marry Catelyn Tully, there was nothing sweet about _that_. He never wanted her. Brandon told me so, on our last night together. My father hoped your grandfather would agree to wed me to your father, but Catelyn Tully got that one as well. I was left with young Lord Dustin, until Ned Stark took him from me. Willam…” she inhaled sharply through her nose before she began again, “…he was so much like my Wynne. Sharp as the blade of a battle axe. A bit awkward. Bookish. A mincer of words. Cruel to be kind.”

“Brandon left, but Willam always stayed. It was he who held me while I bore two of Brandon’s children, he whom I grew to love enough that I consented to be his wife. Willam and I had been married half a year when Lord Robert rose in rebellion and your father, now Lord of Winterfell, called his banners. I begged him not to go to war, but he was a man full of pride and nothing would serve but that he lead the Barrowton levies himself.”

“I gave him a horse the day he set out. A red stallion with a fiery mane, the pride of my lord father’s herds. Willam swore that he would ride him home to me.”

Sansa knew how this story ended. “Father returned the horse to you,” she murmured, “and told you that your lord had died an honorable death.”

Barbrey didn’t bother to stifle her snort. “What is honor worth?” she asked in retort. “Can honor keep me warm at night? Can it sit beside me whilst I hold court in Barrow Hall? Can honor be the father that my lord would have been to our daughter?”

Sansa did her utmost to hide the swell of pity she felt. Barbrey would never forgive her for it, no more than she would ever forgive the Starks for everything that was taken from her.

“Mother.” Wynne stepped into her solar belly first, her swollen ankles visible underneath the lace-trimmed hem of her sage green nightdress; she wore a high-collared pink mantle trimmed in black foxfur, and somehow the colors didn’t clash when combined with her rose-gold hair and pale freckled skin. Beauty and fashion were defense mechanisms for Wynne, armor the heir to Barrowton had polished from a young age. It oft made people underestimate her, because a pretty girl could not possibly be dangerous. “Please tell me you didn’t tell her about her uncle’s ‘bloody sword.’ Gods be true, she hasn’t even flowered yet.”

Sansa took umbrage at this, because she would be able to marry Domeric once she flowered if her father permitted it and it vexed her that her moon blood hadn’t come yet. “I’m not a little girl,” she insisted.

Barbrey guffawed, her laughter full-throated and full-bodied. There was nothing malicious or brittle about the sound, which mollified Sansa a bit. Lady peered at Wynne from beneath the table, her golden eyes bright.

Wynne adjusted her eyeglasses and heaved a sigh as she flopped into one of the plush chairs that surrounded the table, hewn of dark varnished wood upholstered in red velvet trimmed in black woven braid. “I flowered when I was nine,” she informed Sansa, “I was still a little girl…a little girl who didn’t need to hear the story of how your uncle took my mother’s maidenhead when he was fifteen and she was fourteen.”

_I’ll be fourteen in two years_, Sansa thought. It must have been a scandal when the heir to Winterfell deflowered the maiden daughter of one of his father’s bannermen. Lord Rickard Stark, her grandfather, ought to have wed Uncle Brandon to Barbrey. Or simply offered Father in his brother’s stead, rather than break the betrothal that would join the House Stark and House Tully. _Why didn’t he?_ she wondered.

“Even if you were to wed Domeric after you flower instead of waiting for your sixteenth nameday,” said Barbrey, “I highly doubt Ned Stark will permit him to consummate the marriage until you come of age. However, it’s not as though you have to wait for your wedding night.”

Wynne sighed again, much louder than before. “Mother,” she huffed in exasperation. “Domeric was your page when men began to flock around you like crows on carrion. Why do you think he’s so gallant? It’s because he watched those men attempt to court you, to use you ill because they wanted Barrowton. Then he watched those same men—or their sons, or their nephews, or their cousins—flock around me a decade later. Domeric won’t deflower Sansa before they’re married, because to do so would dishonor her. Although,” she flicked her gaze to Sansa, “there are many things a girl can do with her betrothed without offering up her maidenhead.” Barbrey smiled and raised her teacup, toasting her daughter. Wynne snorted and raised her teacup in response before she took an elegant sip. “Most of which I highly recommend,” she informed Sansa, “when you feel ready for more than just kissing.”

_Noblewomen must convey dignity and chastity without appearing to think of either one_, her lady mother had told her. _Let no man but one of your family embrace you. Let no man but for your betrothed kiss any more than your fingertips. Let your betrothed kiss only your fingers, cheek, or forehead. Heed me, Sansa: no highborn girl has ever suffered from keeping men at arm’s length. Now that you’re betrothed, the future of your family’s bloodline and your future lord’s bloodline should be your greatest concern. If you remain a maiden until you are wed, you will be a prize to your future husband’s house and an honor to your own_.

Mother had been paraphrasing from _Advice to Young Noblewomen_ by Septa Fronia, a book Sansa had been given once her formal education with Septa Mordane began. Now more than ever, she understood why Mother had never felt as though she belonged in the North, why Father had built her a sept—his gods of wood and root weren’t concerned with piety or chastity or any of the virtues a southron lady was supposed to embody. Lady Mormont was unwed and she had five daughters whom she claimed had been fathered by a bear, one of whom was unmarried and had two children of her own she claimed were fathered by a bear as well. Barbrey hadn’t been concerned about her chastity, and Wynne had kept all of her suitors at arm’s length only because she hadn’t trusted any of them. Kenna flirted copiously, and Sansa’s redstarts had caught sight of her kissing three different men in the span of a month. When she pointed out that all of them were much too lowborn for Kenna to wed, she had pertly told Sansa that kissing was _fun_.

Sansa was torn between asking them to explain what those many other things were and whether or not it would be appropriate to ask burning questions about her half-brother and sister with Barbrey in the room. “Have you been kissed by anyone besides Lord Bolton?” she asked instead.

Wynne tilted her head and noiselessly sucked the flesh on the inside of her cheek to gnaw in contemplation before she answered the question. “I was betrothed at birth to Ser Addam Dustin,” she told Sansa, “my father’s cousin. When he asked what I wanted for my fifteenth nameday, I told him that I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted to understand what all the fuss was about,” she put her teacup on its saucer with a soft clinking sound, “to know what it felt like. Addam did as I wanted, and it was…” the spoon in the glass jar of honey scooped a glob of golden sweetness into her teacup by itself as she articulated, “…underwhelming. There are worse things in this world than a marriage devoid of passion, I told myself. Addam died less than a moonturn after that.”

Sansa had overheard Mother and Father discussing the death of Ser Addam Dustin after the raven arrived with the news—dark wings, dark words. Mother had suggested they betroth Robb to Wynne, but Father refused. Sansa hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but Arya had dragged her upstairs to Father’s solar because she wanted to hear the story of how a band of northmen had vanquished the outlaw Aegon Bloodborne, born a Frey of the Crossing. Ser Addam had been drowned in a bog, and every bird in the fen had pecked the outlaws to death. Those outlaws had their eyeballs torn out, their entrails strewn over the branches of trees almost like a warning. Now, Sansa knew Wynne had slain the outlaws to avenge her betrothed. Addam might’ve been an underwhelming kisser, but he was a member of her family and she had loved him. Just not in the manner a lady should love her lord husband.

“When my lord of Bolton first kissed me,” Wynne murmured shyly and took another sip of tea, “I understood what all the fuss was about.”

“Roose does know what he’s doing,” Barbrey said with a wicked grin while she poured milk and a spoonful of sugar into her own tea.

“Mother!” Wynne squeezed her eyes shut with an indignant squawk and shook her head as if to shake the image of her lady mother kissing her lord husband out of her mind, but she was giggling so hard her shoulders trembled.

Sansa couldn’t imagine ever having such a conversation with _her_ mother, but she was ecstatic that Domeric was much too gallant to have the sordid history that his father had. It wasn’t something that seemed to bother Wynne, since Lord Roose had all his affairs before he married her. Sansa didn’t even want to think of Domeric with anyone else, because he was hers now—and forever.


	36. A Woman’s War {II}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 2**  
Chapter 11: A Woman’s War {II}
> 
> Wynne settles into prepartum confinement whilst Roose worries about the potential complications of her pregnancy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **WARNING**: HERE THERE BE SMUT. After over ~5,000 words of plot, because I cannot do porn without plot.
> 
> Qarth doesn’t canonically have a religion, but since Quaithe is one of the representatives from the city who comes seeking Daenerys and her dragons in _ACoK_ despite being Asshai’i, it’s not a stretch to assume at least some Qartheen are followers of R’hllor. Thus, in this AU that’s their main religion.

**Protected by a thing deeper**  
**than affection, more jagged.**

Joan Naviyuk Kane, “Exit Glacier”

* * *

**☙** **ⅩⅩⅩ** **❧**

298 AC

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

When teatime surrendered to late afternoon, Wynne answered the correspondence that had piled high in her absence. Lord Stannis had written her to ask after Aly. Wynne penned her response while pondering the match the king had made. It was horribly ironic that Lyanna Stark’s only daughter was to wed a Baratheon, albeit not the one to whom her mother had been promised.

_Ser Stannis of the House Baratheon, Lord of Dragonstone_, she began each and every letter to him thus because he was partial to such formality, _Lady Alysanne of the House Stark is the first true friend I have ever made without duty, a sense of family obligation, or magic as the impetus, for my dearest and oldest friends are Lady Ellara of the House Stout, the daughter of a petty lord sworn once to my lord father and again to my lady mother who chose to accompany me as my lady-in-waiting rather than remain in Barrowton when I wed my lord husband, Domeric of the House Bolton, whom I consider more of a brother than a cousin, Lady Mayseline of House Vyrwel and House Tyrell, who became friends with me because we have greenseeing in common, and Mistress Alyssum, a granddaughter of the woodswitch and midwife in service at Barrow Hall. I have never made friends easily, but I steadfastly cherish those I have._

_Having only known Aly half a year, I cannot speak to her character as well as someone who knows her better. Not even greensight is a substitute for such insight. I can speak of her fierce loyalty to those who have earned her affection, of how voraciously she reads, of her yearning for something beyond the walls of Winterfell behind which her lord father has kept her confined but for the hunting and hawking trips she takes into the wolfswood, and of my own hopes for my friend. _ _I hope you will not harm her, neither physically nor emotionally. I hope you will not resent her for the manner of her birth, nor treat her as inferior because of it. I hope you will not presume that because she is a woman, she is strange and unfathomable. We’re not so very strange, Lord Stannis. We feel, as men do. We think, as men do. We love and hate, as men do. We’re all fashioned of flesh and blood, with hearts and minds._

_Whilst I know you think your brother the king slighted you when he gave you Dragonstone and now you think he has slighted you again by offering you a legitimized bastard for a new bride, neither was intended as such. Dragonstone has been the seat of the Targaryen crown prince since the reign of Aenys the Milksop, who created the title Prince of Dragonstone and bestowed it upon his heir, Aegon the Uncrowned. King Robert named you his heir before his wife became pregnant and granted you Dragonstone because of this. Aly has been promised to you because King Robert wants to see a Stark wed to a Baratheon, and because he thinks marrying a maiden so fair as she might serve to “pry the stick from Stannis’ tight ass”—his words, not mine. I do think your brother the king does love you in his own way, even though neither of you is particularly fond of the other. It’s quite possible, and most probable, to love someone whom you dislike. Especially if that someone is a member of your family._

There was a time and place for severe formality, but Stannis would appreciate her honestly in this, even though Wynne knew he would not appreciate her vulgarity. It still boggled her mind beyond all reason that Melisandre had so fervently believed Stannis was the prince that was promised. Stannis wasn’t born of the line of Jaehaerys the Clever and Princess Shaera, nor was he a prince despite being the grandson of a princess and brother of a king. Melisandre had assumed the prince that was promised was born on Dragonstone because that would indeed be amidst the salt of the Narrow Sea and the smoke that rose from the peak of the Dragonmont. Stannis was Lord of Dragonstone, but he was born at Storm’s End. Although the castle of the Storm Queens and Kings of old could fit that description as well, since the ancestral seat of House Durrandon was built on the eastern Westerosi shore of the Narrow Sea. Still, the fact remained that Stannis was descended from the wrong branch of House Targaryen. Jaehaerys the Clever had fathered no dragonseeds; he was notoriously faithful to his sister-wife even after her death. Aerys had forced his mistresses to drink moon tea because he was paranoid that any bastards he fathered would plot against him. Rhaegar had only trueborn sons and daughters. There were only four candidates yet living: Rhaenys, Aegon, Aly and Jon. Melisandre no longer believed Stannis would be the one to bring the dawn, but she had remained on Dragonstone because Lightbringer was in one of the caves beneath the castle.

_I look forward to meeting you in the flesh upon the arrival of the royal court at Winterfell. Enclosed is one of the incunable I have collected, a tome small enough to send by raven. I expect the Lady Shireen to return it to me along with the other scrolls, books, and manuscripts I have loaned her when our paths converge._

_With utmost regards,_

_Wynne of the House Dustin and House Bolton, Lady of the Dreadfort, heir to Barrowton and Harrenhal, and Bride of Trees_

With nothing of the cabal or the conspiracy that bordered on rebellion they had been fomenting in this correspondence, it was safe to sign her name. Thusly, Wynne affixed her signature to the letter and sealed it around the small tome.

Shireen Baratheon would get on with Hoster like a house on fire, but Wynne had been hesitant to suggest they correspond because such a suggestion might be seen as her attempting to predispose Shireen to accept her cousin as a suitor when she was old enough. Hoster was a third son, and Stannis might consider such a suit an insult to his daughter. Even though Shireen would likely wed a younger son rather than an heir to another seigniorial demense, because she was the heir to Dragonstone—and would be heir to Storm’s End as well, if Stannis ever succeeded in convicting the queen of treason and delegitimizing her children. Wynne had bucked that nuptial trend, but that was because she felt loath to deprive her mother of the rulership Lady Barbrey had earned several times over merely because she was the last of her line and therefore had a stronger claim to her father’s ancestral seat. Shireen would have no such compunctions when she came of age.

It struck her as strange that neither Robert nor Stannis had thought of a match between Tommen and Shireen. Tommen was an incest-begotten bastard, but he was also the heir to Storm’s End. Renly was unmarried and he preferred the company of men, so the odds of him ever fathering a son or even a daughter to succeed him were quite slim. Any children Aly bore Stannis would inherit either Storm’s End or Dragonstone, whichever their father chose not to bestow upon his eldest daughter. Unless the king chose to legitimize Edric Storm and grant Storm’s End to his own son. Wynne doubted very much that he would, however.

Renly, like Stannis, had noticed that neither the princes nor the princess resembled the king. It wasn’t uncommon for a child to favor one parent over the other, so lack of resemblance to one parent wasn’t sufficient proof of bastardy. This hadn’t stopped Renly from concocting a plan to use the rumors of their bastardy as a pretext to persuade his brother to set Cersei Lannister aside in order to wed Lady Margaery Tyrell, a gorgeous maid of sixteen. Renly, not unlike Stannis, had underestimated how ambitious House Lannister was and how viciously the queen would fight to keep the power her family had obtained through her unhappy marriage to the king. Any woman in her position would do the same.

Tywin Lannister would never allow Stannis to put Cersei on trial for treason and thereby drag the Lannister name through the muck, and the lioness would never allow the stag to set her aside. If they wanted to defeat the Lannisters, they would have to kill their entire main branch from Tywin to Tommen. Ser Jaime and Tyrion might be spared, but they would not emerge unscathed; they would, at the very least, be sent to the Wall, if they didn’t fall in battle. There were scores of spare Lannisters as well, with a few Peakes and Freys thrown in: Tywin had a sister and three brothers, all of whom had issue, and seven cousins, one of whom he had married, four of whom had issue. Not to mention the Lannisters, Lannys, Lannetts and Lantells of Lannisport. There was no extinguishing House Lannister; the roots of their family tree went much too deep. Unless they wanted to take a page out of Aegon the Conqueror’s book and raze the Rock and Lannisport to the ground.

Roose especially didn’t want to make an enemy of House Lannister; her lord husband was a boy of seven when House Reyne and House Tarbeck rose in revolt and renounced their fealty to their overlords. Ser Tywin Lannister, then his weak father’s heir, crushed the rebellion. Lord Walderan Tarbeck was executed along with his sons who hadn’t fallen in battle, their severed heads impaled on spikes. Tywin marched on Tarbeck Hall, had siege engines assembled once the mistress of the castle refused to surrender, and brought the castle down on Lady Ellyn Tarbeck, born a Reyne of Castamere, and her son Tion. Lady Rohanne and Lady Cyrelle, her daughters, were forced to join the Silent Sisters after Ser Amory Lorch threw Rohanne’s son Alyn Tarbeck, a boy of three, down a well. After Lord Roger took a wound in the battle that ensued between the forces of House Lannister and House Reyne and retreated to Castamere, his brother Ser Reynard sent terms of surrender to Tywin, who ignored the terms and instead sealed the mines and diverted a stream to flood the castle and drown everyone inside. Then he set Castamere ablaze, and left the ruins of both keeps standing empty as a warning to those who dared to scorn the lions of the Rock.

Wynne had witnessed it all in the greenscape decades after the fact, and she was as reluctant to make an enemy of them as her lord husband. Alas, they had no choice. House Lannister had a stranglehold on the Seven Kingdoms that would only escalate after the death of the king, and they would claw for power until every last one of them was dead.

There was happier news in her other letters. Lady Tyta and Lady Alyx were both with child, though Fair Walda had yet to conceive. Uncle Roger would mislike that, even though he was the one who had chosen to accompany Wynne and Roose on their venture beyond the Wall for almost four turns of the moon rather than remain at Woodsedge with his new bride. It wasn’t as though he could have impregnated her from thousands of leagues away. Not even the legendary Garth Greenhand had been so virile.

Jon had written to Aegon to suggest the foundation of wildling noble houses and intermarriage with northerners, with the hope of purging some of the bad blood between them and the noble houses of the North through a new generation. Most of the wildling clans had refused outright, but some were more amenable. Thusly were House Thenn and House Redbeard founded. Gerrick Kingsblood, now head of House Redbeard, had offered up all three of his daughters to northern suitors and requested a northern bride for his son. Sigorn, the only son of the Magnar of Thenn, was seeking a northern bride as well. Lord Stark had invited them to his court at Winterfell, along with all of the eligible young ladies and lordlings in the North. Wynne idly wondered if her mother would take a wildling lover, when and if the opportunity arose.

Robb had enclosed another letter, in which he professed his hope that some of his prospects would be married off to wildling men. Jonelle Cerwyn was a homely maid almost twice his age, and none of the others had struck his fancy. Gwyn Whitehill had been offered to Jareth Redbeard because her prospects had dwindled after she gave her maidenhead to Asher Forrester in a futile attempt to prevent her lord father from arranging her marriage to another. Asher had been exiled to Essos by his father, but the damage was done. Jareth had purportedly agreed to the match, because the free folk from beyond the Wall cared not a whit about whether a woman had remained a maiden until her wedding night. Which left Agatha Umber, Talia Forrester, Arsa Flint, and Wynne’s cousin Wynafryd as prospects for Robb.

Altogether there were fifty eligible men and half as many eligible ladies in the North, since half the noblemen were eligible only because they had been widowed once or twice. There were four-and-forty houses in total, from the ruling house and principal bannermen to lesser lords and masterly houses, the northern equivalent of southron landed knights. Not including the reclusive crannogmen, who rarely intermarried with the nobility south or north of the Neck, or the Skagosi island clans.

Under ordinary circumstances the heirs and heiresses would have first pick of suitors, but no head of a greater noble house would consent to wed their sons or daughters to a wildling unless they had no other prospects. This was, of course, the snag Jon’s plan had inevitably hit after Gwyn was betrothed to Jareth.

Now that he was a Stark by royal decree, Jon himself had been inundated with marriage prospects. It seemed a match with a legitimized Stark bastard was preferable to a match with a wildling, or so he had written. Whilst he was tempted to take a wildling for a bride and lead by example, he was hesitant to marry a woman he had never met. Hence inviting the wildling ladies to attend court at Winterfell.

Wynne didn’t particularly care if the wildlings assimilated or not because she didn’t expect them to survive the prophesized War for the Dawn, but that wouldn’t happen for another six years and there was no harm in attempting to leech some of the aforementioned bad blood in the meantime.

Ghastly smoke unfurled from the slim thread of obsidian that passed for a wick crowning her glass candle, warning her that someone was attempting to contact her by candlelight. Pale etherous, colorless and odorless plumes curled upward laconically towards her ceiling. Wynne hissed and curled her fingers into claws as her umpteenth false labor pains stabbed at the base of her spine and snarled into a tight lithic throb low in her stomach, ebbing and flowing. Then she lit her glass candle by pricking her thumb with a pin, drawing a bright red drop of blood near her nailbed. It wasn’t as painful as pricking the fleshy pad; she barely felt the silver pin break the skin.

Mayseline emerged from the smoke, ephemeral and coalescent; the chair in which her friend was seated was formed of fumes in the candlelight. It was a wheelchair made of wood and steel that Mayseline used whenever she wasn’t ambulatory because her left ankle, hip, and knee joints were too inflamed. Willas oft used a wheelchair as well instead of his cane and a boiled leather brace that straightened his twisted leg enough that he could walk, but his was gilded with the roses and thorns of House Tyrell. Mayseline had adorned her chair with celestrium branches and broad leaves.

“Bad leg day?” Wynne felt compelled to ask even though it was a rhetorical question, one they both knew the answer to.

Mayseline nodded wearily. “We’re in the midst of the summer harvest,” she explained, “Alerie and I are doing inventory for days to make certain the wayns are stocked before the next supply train goes out and the crops are rotated so the next cycle of seeds are sowed on schedule. Lady Olenna is of no help now that she and Loras are scheming with the peacock to make Margaery a queen. Alerie is Lady of Highgarden now, so why should Lady Olenna help perform those duties?” Here she rolled her eyes. Mayseline greatly respected the Queen of Thorns for her wickedly sharp wit and cunning mind, but she wasn’t particularly fond of the old woman. “Lord Baelish has ordered fifty wagons of food a day sent to King’s Landing, because of the blight in the Crownlands. Which isn’t helping to fill the royal coffers.”

“It’s filling your coffers,” Wynne pointed out wryly.

Mayseline huffed. “I did as you suggested and summoned a maester of the Citadel with knowledge of appertization to teach Maester Lomys canning,” she said. “We’ve made hundreds of jars of preserves, not to mention blanching and drying and pickling. No amount of money yielded from our harvest will sustain us come winter in the manner that food will. We’re sending food supplies to the Crownlands, the Westerlands, the Stormlands, the Iron Islands, and Dorne. All while attempting to fill the food stores of the Reach for winter. I envy you northerners—you have fewer mouths to feed.”

Wynne cocked her head in concession. Although the Reach was a third the size of the North, they boasted the highest population of any region of the Seven Kingdoms at roughly twelve million. There were only four million people in the North, approximately—and northerners didn’t have to feed the entire realm in addition to their own people. “At least you don’t have to build more grain stores,” she muttered. “We’re fortunate to have ore deposits in the North, since the iron of the Iron Islands is a dwindling resource…but steel is still expensive.”

Mayseline had no sympathy for her plight. “So says perhaps the richest woman in the Seven Kingdoms,” she deadpanned as she inspected her nails with a splay of her fingers. Mayseline liked to mix her own nail varnish when she had the time. Today’s shade was a metallic dove grey that evoked a steel edge. It glittered with silver dust, the sheen marred by chips in the polish from hours of work inspecting wayns and meticulously doing inventory.

“I’m only the richest woman in the Seven Kingdoms because I’ve been hoarding my incomes for a decade but for the money I spent on books and my wardrobe and gardening and repairing summer flood damage along the banks of the Burn of Barrow,” Wynne retorted. “Now I’ve spent almost three million golden dragons in half a year. I’m not saying the peace treaty with the wildlings wasn’t worth it and I know the glassmakers I transplanted from Myr were an excellent longterm investment, but I cannot keep throwing money around like petals at the Festival of Flowers in Barrowton. Lord Stark is restoring Moat Cailin and building Jon a new keep at Sea Dragon Point, since his forebearers razed the Warg King’s castle after they killed him. There are bridges that need repairs and walls to fortify with dragonglass wards and firewood to chop and whale oil to stockpile. I was thinking of hiring a Qohorik to design and forge Valyrian steel plate armor for Domeric and for our dragons, but…”

“…but then followers of R’hllor in Qohor rioted and burned the City of Sorcerers to the ground,” Mayseline finished her sentence quietly, “in order to sacrifice every follower of the Black Goat to their Lord of Light. Which inspired the merchant princes of Qarth to procure wildfire from an alchemist and set the House of the Undying ablaze.”

“Yes.” Wynne muffled a yawn in the palm of one hand.

Sorcery was a specific brand of magic. Pacts with otherworldly entities known as demons were required to practice such black arts. Most demonic entities were psychophages—soul eaters—and those who dwelled in the House of the Undying were the last demons left in the world. Now there were none. This was something of a relief, because the warlocks of Qarth had ruled the Queen of Cities from the shadows before the Doom of Valyria and they were once a force to be reckoned with. In the eleven years since magic had been rekindled, the warlocks had struggled to regain their former glory by extorting gold and slaves from the merchant princes. Who responded by ordering a mass execution of the sorcerers on Warlock’s Way before they escalated and burned the House of Undying to ashes rather than pay such tithes.

“I cannot blame the Qartheen for immolating the warlocks and their Undying Ones,” Wynne said, “but it’s only a matter of time before witch burnings come back in fashion. Which does not bode well for us.”

Mayseline folded her hands in her lap and tucked her inflamed ankle underneath the bend of her other knee, her skirts rustling. “Alas,” she murmured, “people fear and hate anything they do not understand…”

“…and people have never understood magic,” Wynne finished her sentence with a rueful tinge to her voice. History became legend, legend became myth, and they weren’t safe now that the reality of them had been loosed upon the world. Then she asked, “What more have I missed?”

* * *

Wynne had fallen deeply asleep by the time he had dinner brought to her chambers, her eyeglasses folded on the middle shelf of the bookcase she had put on the right side of her featherbed instead of a nightstand. Leatherbound books towered over the brass frames and a pile of unsealed letters she must have read and responded to before she fell asleep, casting ephemeral shadows over the edge of the shelf in the candlelight. Stamped in the blobs of colored wax that had sealed the letters were the bats of House Whent in yellow, the ravens and weirwood of House Blackwood in arterial red, the crowned stag of House Baratheon of Dragonstone in gold, the direwolf of House Stark in white.

More bookcases lined the walls, until a doorway or a window impeded the dominion of her truly impressive collection of tomes and scrolls and manuscripts. Whilst some of the bookcases were against the wall facing outward, some had been positioned back to back and meticulously arranged in a manner that spawned a maze of bookcases with paths that led to her bed, her wardrobe, her solar, her workroom, her privy, the smaller chambers where Ellara lived, and those in which Salvia would be staying during the duration of her prepartum and postpartum confinement. Each held more reading material than was reasonable, but that meant her books and scrolls and manuscripts were no longer spilling out of trunks or stacked in piles on the floor. In her knitting basket were a pair of plush dragons knitted from two colors of yarn, stuffed toys his wife had made for their unborn sons.

It was obvious that Wynne did not oft sleep in her chambers. Most of her cosmetics—the creams and oils she used to tame her unruly curls and keep her skin unblemished and soft—had migrated to his chambers, either in his bathroom or arranged upon a dressing table against the wall outside the bathroom door. One such concoction made by a Lysene alchemist removed blemishes, pimples, and even scars. When he asked her why she hadn’t removed the striae on her thighs, breasts and stomach, Wynne had told Roose that she liked them because they resembled tree roots wrought in flesh.

When he married her, Roose had married a dark forest growing in the skin of a pretty young girl, and she put down roots inside his fortress. Those hungry, thirsty roots had tangled around his cold heart, until it began to thaw and melt for her. Which didn’t make him a warm man. Roose was still as cold and cunning as ever, but now he needed Wynne and his need was a truly monstrous thing.

Roose directed the servant from the kitchens to place the silver tray of food on top of the wooden chest at the foot of the featherbed and dismissed her before he peeled back the blankets and furs nestled around his wife, a sliver of a smile emerging when she made a faint querulous noise in protest and curled protectively around her gravid belly as she attempted to burrow into the warmth that clung to the blankets on her other side. In her simple chemise of undyed soft cotton with her unruly curls plotting an escape from the thick mussed braid that flopped over her shoulder and down her back, she looked so lovely. There was no one else in her chambers because her ladies and Sansa had learned to make themselves scarce at night. Elsewise, they unwillingly bore witness to intimate moments between husband and wife.

_Mine_, he thought as the blood in his veins thrummed with a low, primal beat.

Salvia had slammed into the great hall earlier that afternoon like a battering ram in the shape of a wizened old woman and instructed him in blunt sign language on how to help Wynne before she gave birth. There was a higher risk of preterm labor with multiples and twice the risk of vaginal laceration with twins, because two babies meant doubling the chances of tearing the delicate tissue of Wynne’s little cunt. Salvia had all but ordered him to give his wife a perineal massage every day until the onset of labor in order to reduce the risk of that occurring, a preventative measure she informed him that he should have begun to take at the beginning of Wynne’s third trimester. Roose had no objections to a massage that involved him putting his fingers inside Wynne, something he enjoyed in a more prurient context. Salvia had also informed him that pleasuring his lady would ensure an easier birth, but he had looked her dead in the eye and retorted that all of Wynne’s pleasure would be his whether she was pregnant with his sons or not.

At six-and-thirty weeks, twins were full term. However, their lungs wouldn’t be fully developed by then so either the maesters or the midwife would have to monitor them constantly to make sure they didn’t stop breathing. Salvia had brought her granddaughter Alyssum with her to supervise the twins fulltime in the event the midwife and both maesters were too busy. Wynne had told him that she planned to breastfeed their sons herself rather than using a wet nurse, something repopularized by Queen Cersei. Contrary to popular belief, women could get pregnant again while breastfeeding. It was unlikely, but not out of the question.

Roose appreciated how Salvia had spoken of the aftermath of the birth as though it was a foregone conclusion that his wife and sons would survive unscathed, even though he knew it was unsettlingly common for women to die in childbed or shortly after the child was born. One of his sisters had succumbed to childbed fever and Lord Redfort had simply remarried and fathered another son afterward. Roose knew he couldn’t simply remarry if giving birth to his sons killed his wife.

It wasn’t as though he wouldn’t survive the loss, but he didn’t want to lose her because she wasn’t a mere plaything or a mild diversion. Roose was happy for what felt like the first time in his life because of her. Greenseer. Skinchanger. Gamechanger. This was happiness like a knife in the heart, the blade slipping in between his ribs. Wynne had utterly ruined him, because now he couldn’t be happy without her. It almost made him want to lock her away where no one else could ever set eyes on her. Capture her. Chain her up. Cage her. It would be like keeping a flower in a cold dark room, depriving her of the water and sunlight that she needed to survive and thrive.

Roose was cruel, but he wasn’t so depraved that he would rather watch the woman he loved wilt away when he could protect her in a manner that wouldn’t destroy her.

“Ngh,” she groaned softly, her eyelids fluttering open as she turned sluggishly to squint at him over her shoulder. “Roose…? Do I smell food?”

Roose nodded brusquely. “Dinner is served,” he told her.

* * *

Wynne reached out and her eyeglasses floated into the grasp of her fingers before she unfolded the brass frames and nudged them up onto the bridge of her nose. On the silver tray of food was a plate of roasted vegetables, white fish marinated in garlic and lemon and butter, and still warm potato rolls, a pitcher of lemonsweet, a set of silverware and a linen napkin carefully folded into a shape that vaguely resembled a crown. Roose was standing by her bedside, unnaturally still yet completely relaxed. Just watching her as she elegantly stabbed a slice of slightly blackened onion with her fork and began to eat. There was only one plate, so Wynne assumed he ate in the great hall without her before he had a portion of dinner brought to her. Now he watched her devour her food in comfortable silence, but for the scrape of silver against earthenware and a cacophony of mastication.

Now that her confinement had begun, she wouldn’t be able to see. When she opened her third eye, she could see everywhere and everyone and everything contained in that vivid moment of pure insight…but everything that had gone unseen by her because she kept her third eye closed wasn’t visible to her unless she touched a weirwood tree and gleaned that information from the gods. If she attempted to look back into the past without an arboreal conduit, the shades of the past overshadowed the present and overwhelmed her until she couldn’t see _anything_.

This was how she knew she wasn’t a god despite her godlike power, because only being human could hurt so much. If she were a god, she wouldn’t feel like this. Weak. Blind. Unpredictable. Unsafe. Unprepared. Entropy, heretical maesters had called it: the lack of order and predictability that ruled the world. Wynne saw more than most, but that measure of disorder was still present in the past and in the future. Eternal as chaos.

How could she bring children into such a chaotic world? How could she protect them? How could she keep them safe after they were born?

It was no small wonder that so many Westerosi chose to have faith in the Seven, because the old gods of the earth and sky could not be faceted into familiar archetypes with seven human faces: a father, a mother, a smith, a warrior, a maiden, a crone, even death personified as a stranger. Whereas her nameless and faceless and numerous gods of forest and river and stream and mountain were more chaotic than comforting, even though she knew their worshippers could find as much comfort before a heart tree as the followers of the Seven did in a sept. In the Seven, people saw an innocent and virtuous maiden, a strong and capable smith, a wise crone, a merciful and compassionate mother, a fair and just father, a courageous and victorious warrior. Wynne saw only the faces carved into the bone white bark to mark where the heart and souls of dead gods were rooted in the earth, where the essence of magic became more physical than metaphysical. It was as the ironborn said: _What is dead may never die_.

Now that primeval connection she felt to her gods had been cut off and she was feeling bereft, her skin crawling with anxiety that pricked like a thorn in a lion’s paw. Wynne heaved a sigh as the warmth of the food settled in her belly, put aside her empty tray, and cleaned her teeth before she looked up into the pale grey eyes of her husband. During the first months of their marriage, she was shy about things like cleaning her teeth and using the chamber pot when Roose was in the room; she went to the privy chamber rather than urinate or defecate in his presence, and she was reluctant to clean her teeth in front of him because doing so involved unladylike gargling and spitting. Then she broke wind in front of him for the first time despite her best efforts, and he remained unfazed. Now they had been married for nearly a year, and that shyness had been eroded by how comfortable she felt in the presence of her dread lord. “I need to stop overthinking,” she informed him. “Make me stop, Roose. Please.”

Roose folded himself onto the featherbed in one smooth movement before he leaned in and kissed her long and hard and merciless, the fingers of one hand twisting into the curls at the nape of her neck that were in the process of unraveling from her braid and tugging almost cruelly as his arms tightened very deliberately around her. Wynne opened her mouth for his perusal and made a sweet little noise as her arms tangled around him; the fingernails of one hand scraped gently through his short hair while the fingertips of her other hand clung to his back through his tunic to hold him as close to her as she could with her swollen belly impeding her. Roose took everything he wanted from the kiss and tilted her neck to sweep his tongue into her mouth, a low sound of approval and arousal thrumming in his throat as she made a strategic retreat to flick the soft tip of her tongue over his upper lip and sucked his bottom lip in between her teeth.

Wynne parted her lips again with a moan and let him thrust deep inside. Roose felt the sharp edge of his anger thaw as the warmth and softness of her body overwhelmed him, and his lip curled in a growl before he pulled back to look at her. Flushed pink and pretty with desire, she gazed back at him with a contumacious upward cant of her chin.

Roose bent to kiss her chin because he found that quite endearing. “My lady,” he whispered before she kissed his nose, coaxing a grin to his lips. Roose pressed a quick kiss to her brow, like the softest glancing blow. Deep in his muscles, the underlying tension had shifted from residual anger to eager anticipation that bordered on desperation. Now that the day was done he wanted to have and to hold his wife, because touching Wynne told him she was safe and warm and still his. It had been far too long since he tasted her, since he had been inside of her. After the Battle of the Haunted Forest, Wynne had been too burned out for anything but falling asleep in his arms and sharing the occasional hot meal for almost two moonturns. It was unsettling, seeing the heavy toll her magic took on her. Now it seemed his wife had recuperated, and he intended to take advantage of that. “Mistress Salvia has informed me that I must endeavor to pleasure you every night until your water breaks,” he whispered conspiratorially.

“Well,” she whispered back and bit her bottom lip to stifle a snort of dry amusement. “If the midwife says you must, then I daresay you have no choice but to comply.”

Roose smirked before he swept her chemise up over her head by the hem and stripped her bare, but for her silk and lace smallclothes. At the beginning of their marriage he assumed she wore pretty underthings to please him, only to learn that she wore them because they made her feel pretty. Wynne unfurled her fingers and his own clothes vanished as her magic flitted over his skin, his doublet and tunic and breeches and hose and braies conjured into the laundry basket off to one side of the door to her chambers. “How very efficient of you,” he said and smirked wider as her soft hands skimmed up from his forearms to grip his shoulders.

Wynne always wore gloves while hunting or practicing throws with her battle axe or her knives, so her fingers and palms bore no calluses. It was a piece of the demure noblewoman façade that his wife had worn like a suit of armor for most of her life, and concealing all visible evidence that she knew how to wield a weapon made anyone who paid attention to that sort of thing underestimate her. Wynne kissed and licked the side of his neck and dug her nails—painted a gilded shade of dark metallic green that day—into his upper arms while she nipped and sucked on his collarbone, unleashing a frenzy of desire that sent need swirling through his veins. Roose smoothed his hands over the curves of her voluptuous hips and gravid belly to cup each of her breasts in his palms, enjoying the weight and feel of them. Wynne made a noise that was half indignant and half ecstatic when he pinched and plucked at her nipples, coaxing the pink nubs from plump and soft to achingly hard in between his fingers and thumbs.

“I am going to start leaking colostrum if you insist on playing with those,” she pointed out.

Roose made a soft noise in response before he bent to nuzzle her cleavage and fondled her breasts with impunity while he kissed and sucked a bruise on the swell of the left one. Then he sank his teeth into the right one, not hard enough to break the skin but enough to make her squirm and whimper. It wasn’t a pained sound that spilled out of her throat when he left more bite marks on each of her lovely breasts, either. “What if I do insist?” he asked, his thumbs still rubbing back and forth over her nipples as her grip on his shoulders inexorably tightened.

Wynne arched her eyebrows at him behind her eyeglasses and gently poked his nose with one fingertip. “Then you must summon the chambermaids and have the bedsheets changed afterward,” she answered pertly.

Roose laughed soft and deep, his amusement filling his chest and stomach in spite of how quiet his laughter was. “Such a pragmatist,” he murmured, his voice fond. It might have wounded his pride that his wife could even think of changing the bedsheets while he was attempting to seduce her, were he any other man. However, he admired her incessant practicality. It had saved her life more than once thus far, and he appreciated her survival instincts because that proclivity of hers had kept them both alive. Still, that didn’t mean he couldn’t tease her a little. “How could you even think of changing the bedsheets right now?” he asked, his voice forlorn as he tweaked her nipples in between his fingertips.

Wynne mustered a snort and bit her bottom lip while her back arched, a sweet lewd sound escaping her. “Because you enjoy making a mess of me,” she retorted.

Roose claimed her mouth with another kiss in response and cradled her face in one hand while he slipped the other between her legs and parted her folds with his fingers. “Already so wet,” he whispered against her mouth with irrepressible satisfaction. Roose dipped two fingers into the silken heat of her, applying downward pressure to perform the perineal massage as Salvia had no doubt instructed him to do while he circled her asshole with the rough pad of his thumb.

“Please,” she begged.

Roose bit down on her shoulder and twisted his wrist before he slipped another strong finger inside her; the distinct sensations of the sting of his teeth and those slick rough strokes threatened to scramble her brain. If her eyes were open, she felt sure they would have crossed when his thumb circled her clit. Wynne dragged the nails of one hand through his hair while he savored the desperate, startled noise she made and redoubled his efforts in getting her to repeat it by moving to crouch at the edge of the featherbed and maneuvering her so that he could spread her with his thumbs. Then his mouth was on her. _Oh, gods_.

It began with a gentle, teasing lick of his tongue from the bottom of her slit to the top. Roose swirled around her clit and sent tremors down her spine, humming low in his throat with pleasure as his tongue retreated before he returned. Heat filled her veins when he changed his pattern and focused solely on her clit, his tongue circling around it slowly and languidly before he sucked on the swollen nub at the apex of her cunt.

Wynne moaned and squirmed while he sucked at her ruthlessly, her fingernails digging into his scalp through his short hair. Not hard enough to draw blood and wound him, but hard enough to make him tighten his grip on her thighs in warning. Wynne felt the evidence of her arousal trickling out of her as Roose licked from her dripping wet hole to her perineum, the muscles in her lower stomach and thighs clenching almost violently when his tongue flicked over her asshole.

It had been too long since he last touched her, but she had been too exhausted to feel that loss—or much of anything—whilst she recovered from the magic burnout. Now, she felt as though her body had been starving for this: the feel of his callused fingers and palms on her skin, the intense manner in which he sought her pleasure, the need rooted deep in the marrow of her bones. Roose withdrew to nip at the skin of her inner thighs and ran his fingers over her slick, hot flesh gently at first. Then he worked two inside of her with a possessive force before he resumed using his mouth, slowly dragging his tongue from his fingers to her clit as her legs began to shake. Wynne squealed in blissful agony while Roose held her on the brink until tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, streaming hot down her cheeks as her legs shook uncontrollably.

Roose didn’t stop even when she began sobbing, because it felt so good it _hurt_. He curled and twisted his fingers inside her with an urgency that was almost painful, teasing her with gentle strokes of his tongue as desire bloomed within her at the unbearable friction. Gasps and whimpers escaped from her as the bloom spread over her breasts and glinted in the pads of her fingers, from her lips all the way down to her toes. Wynne moaned again, the sound caught in her throat as his teeth scraped her clit. Roose touched the little nub with the soft tip of his tongue and it was pure torture, a sharp ache overwhelming her so completely that she writhed and screamed. What syllables she uttered when she came might’ve been his name, or they might’ve been unintelligible. There was a roar in her ears, a strange mix of ecstasy and trepidation. Wynne didn’t know if she wanted to squirm away or seek even more of the rough friction he was using to overstimulate her. Roose made the choice for her and curled his fingers just so while he scraped her clit again with his teeth, forcing her to come again and again.

Without him holding her down she might have flown, even as heavy with child as her body was. There were no thoughts in her mind and no words in her mouth; neither were necessary. When the blissful fog at the edges of her vision began to fade and sharpen, she noticed that Roose was stroking unruly tendrils of sweat-dampened hair away from her face while he loomed over her on his knees with one elbow nestled in the blankets and furs above her shoulder; his other hand was around his cock, and he was rubbing the blunt head of him through her folds and up against her oversensitive clit while he held her gaze and stared at her intently. There was a fervent look in his pale grey eyes that made her clit _throb_ hard while her cunt pulsed desperately inside, even as she inhaled with a hiss of breath drawn in between her teeth. Somehow her body was tighter and more needful than before, all of her muscles taut and screaming. Despite this, he was content to just tease her, slipping the head of him over her clit in rough circles until she wanted to start crying again from sheer frustration.

Roose took his time committing every little expression to memory, reveling in how sensitive her body was and how copiously she blushed; the lovely flush in her cheeks and chest belonged to him, as did every little noise she made. Each touch from him made her shiver and moan, and he enjoyed her reactions to his hands and mouth on her skin more than any game he’d ever played. _I missed this_, he thought, anticipation shivering down his spine and caressing his balls. “Do you want my cock inside you, my lady?” he asked her, his tone at once deeply playful and dark because he already knew the answer.

“Yes,” Wynne answered him breathlessly, her voice hoarse and throat clogged with the dregs of her sobbing. “Please, my lord.”

Roose kept his eyes on hers and slid his cock through her folds to notch the head of him at her opening before he brought the fingers that had been in between her legs to her lips. Wynne opened her mouth thoughtlessly, a trained response. Roose watched her suck on his fingers while he moved his hips and thrust himself inside her in one stroke. With the protrusion of her pregnant belly in between them, their bodies fit together quite differently. It wasn’t something he found unpleasant, however. When he looked at his wife swollen with his seed, a potent feeling of pride swelled in his chest and warmth suffused through his veins. Roose bent to kiss her neck and swept his tongue and teeth from where her pulse beat wildly in her soft throat to nibble on her earlobe, his fingers still in her pretty mouth so he felt her ensuing moan as much as he heard it. Beneath his mouth, the flesh of her throat branded blue by the Night King was eerily cold. Then he withdrew his fingers so that he could reclaim her lips and kiss her hard, harder, hardest.

Wynne shuddered under him every time he bottomed out inside her, writhing and shifting her hips against his to offer herself up to him as best she could. Permitting him to take her deeper, to feel her squeeze and clamp down around him whilst she made the most exquisite sounds. Roose tasted every gasp and whimper and moan, his breath catching and snagging in his throat as his lips parted and he groaned to wordlessly communicate his own pleasure.

When he came, the force of his release tore a visceral cry from his throat—it was so intense that it choked him, and he felt it _everywhere_. In his lungs. In his fingers and toes. In his gut. In the furrow of his brow. In every part of himself.

Wynne kissed his nose and cooed softly, a nonverbal expression of pure contentment. Roose felt his knees go weak and he pressed his forehead against hers, holding her beneath him with the weight of his body; he was still hard and twitching inside her, though he knew he would soon go soft and flaccid. Wynne nuzzled his nose with hers, her soft hands skimming over his back and shoulders.

“You never did start leaking colostrum,” he said, his soft voice raw.

Wynne scoffed and glanced down at her breasts as if to confirm he was correct, proving to him that her mind was muddled from all of the orgasms he bestowed upon her. “You still must summon the chambermaids and have the bedsheets changed,” she retorted.

“Not quite yet,” Roose whispered.

Wynne smiled even as she huffed. “You’re incorrigible,” she whispered back and cuddled him closer. It took him quite a while to summon the chambermaids, after that.


	37. A Woman’s War {III}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 2**  
Chapter 12: A Woman’s War {III}
> 
> Roose welcomes the Dowagers of Raventree to the Dreadfort as the Blackwoods gather to witness the birth of the first greenseer born to another greenseer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I reread _ASoIaF_ and wrote the notes that would become my appendices, one of the questions I asked myself was: where did all the women end up? GRRM has several family trees in _TWoIaF_, but many of the daughters are listed without husbands or issue (e.g. Cregan Stark’s daughters by Lynara Stark and Black Aly, Beron Stark and Lorra Royce’s daughters, Beron’s sister Arsa, the grandchildren of Artos Stark and Lysara Karastark by their sons Brandon and Benjen whom I assume were daughters who married into other families because otherwise there’d be another cadet branch of House Stark elsewhere, Melissa Blackwood’s daughters by Aegon IV, because we know nothing about Bloodraven’s older sisters for some reason, Aegon V’s sisters, etc.). Although it’s possible they all died young and therefore never married or had issue (with the exception of Daella and Rhae, whom we know canonically did have issue according to Maester Aemon), that’s very boring. So, I’ve made a point to explicitly say where those women fit in. House Blackwood specifically interests me because of Betha Blackwood, especially since we don’t know whether she outlived Aegon V or not. 
> 
> There will be a House Blackwood appendix, because I am incorrigible.

**The past is so far away, but it flickers,**   
**then cleaves the night. The bones**   
**of the past splinter between our teeth.**

Ellen Bass, “Sink Your Fingers into the Darkness of My Fur”

* * *

**☙** **ⅩⅩⅩⅠ** **❧**

298 AC

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

A fortnight after Wynne returned to the Dreadfort, she was rudely awakened by a flood that seeped out of her and soaked through her sodden featherbed. Either she had made water on herself in her sleep, or the amniotic sac in her womb had ruptured. Since the smell of urine hadn’t pervaded her bedchamber, she thus surmised that her water had broken while she was dead to the world. Then she conjured her eyeglasses into her hand and sluggishly put them on, wincing at the dull ache that had taken root in her lower back.

Roose wasn’t slumbering beside her, and that meant he was training in the courtyard or performing his seigniorial duties. Ellara was in the midst of doing her duty as seneschal whilst Sansa was still the acting Lady of the Dreadfort, and would be until Wynne emerged from her postpartum confinement. Kenna and Thea had grown accustomed to assisting Sansa in her absence since Jeyne Poole was more of a lady’s maid or a handmaiden than a proper lady-in-waiting. When she cracked open her third eye to observe her surroundings, Wynne saw that her lady mother was breaking her fast in the great hall. There was a chair standing empty beside Roose bedecked with the flower garlands that had adorned the entire fortress and draped with the bridal cloak she wore during their wedding almost like an offering set before an altar to appease their gods, and Barbrey was teasing him about it. “So you may have feelings after all,” she overheard her mother say with a wicked gleam in her eyes and a knowing curl to her lips. “What brought on this unprecedented bout of sentimentality?”

It was a question that Wynne simultaneously wanted and did not want to hear the answer to, and thus she closed her third eye abruptly. Roose had left the same chair standing empty for years out of respect for both of his previous wives. Although his first wife had left him without issue, he still waited the requisite two years during which widows and widowers were expected to mourn for their spouses before he remarried. Roose had done so primarily for appearance’s sake each time, not because he felt any emotional attachment to either lady beyond the respect that was their due. It didn’t necessarily hold any deeper meaning now that she was his wife, even though he had draped the chair with her bridal cloak.

Wynne checked the pocketwatch on her bedside table and scrawled the exact time and duration of the labor pain she felt on a fresh page of her notebook to keep track of the frequency and regularity. Alyssum looked up from her knitting and met her flesh and blood eyes. Eschewing all of her courtesies, Wynne signed, “Please tell your grandmother that I’ve gone into labor.” Alyssum nodded sprucely and dropped her knitting in the basket at her feet as she unfolded herself from the chair in the alcove where she had been sitting and went to fetch Salvia from her quarters. Ignorant people might expect utter silence from a deaf person, but Alyssum made noise aplenty when she moved because she wasn’t aware of sound; her gait was quick and decisive, her footfalls muffled by the carpets on the floor that concealed the stone beneath.

It wasn’t as though she needed a midwife to attend her posthaste. Childbirth still took hours or even days after the amniotic sac ruptured, and twins were oft born hours apart. Wynne just didn’t want to wage a war alone. Idle hands weren’t helping to assuage the anxiety that accompanied the gutwrenchingly visceral anticipation of the birth of her sons, so Wynne procured her own knitting from the basket at her bedside and began sewing a pair of round buttons carved from obsidian onto the face of a pink and red toy dragon she’d knitted in the colors of House Bolton and stuffed with raw wool.

After carrying her sons for almost nine grueling turns of the moon, the reality of her impending motherhood had fermented into a strange brew of delectation and trepidation. It made her wonder if her mother had felt the same. Wynne had never wanted anything as much as she wanted to meet Rogar and Avery, despite her worry that one or both of them would inherit her powerful magic and Roose’s morality. Or lack thereof. There was nothing more frightening than a greenseer with a chilling lack of ethics—the Night King was proof of that. Ramsay had been a more sadistic version of Roose in his youth before his impulsivity had burned out, so those violent delights were hereditary. Wynne had to force herself not to dwell on that.

It was the penultimate day of Pink Moon, two days before her eighteenth nameday. Which fell on Bealtainn, in the midst of the festival of flowers that had begun yesterday, hence the garlands in the great hall. If her labor was prolonged, she might give birth on her nameday.

Salvia made even more noise than Alyssum, because she was—in her own words—too old to blunt her edges. Wynne startled as the woodswitch stomped into her bedchamber and unceremoniously slammed the door behind her. At five-and-seventy, jowly Salvia was unbelievably spry for such a gnarled old woman. Every bone in her wizened body creaked when she moved, a skeletal accompaniment. “How many pains thus far?” the old woman signed, the movements of her hands a bit stiff because of the arthritis in her knuckles and wrists.

Wynne held up one finger. Then she offered her notebook to Salvia, who squinted as she read the note in the topmost right corner of the page. “My amniotic sac ruptured while I slept,” she signed. “I do not know how long ago that was.”

Salvia exhaled a loud snort. “You could have slept through the Doom,” she retorted with the indelicate fondness of one who had known Wynne since before she drew her first breath.

“Volcanoes erupting,” Alyssum signed with a wry grin, “fire raining from the sky and lava flowing in the streets, people screaming and running for their very lives, and Wynne taking a nap.”

It was Alyssum who gave Wynne her name-sign: perspicacious with a W. Although she was the granddaughter of a woodswitch and midwife and thus far below her in station, Alyssum had been her friend since childhood. It was unusual for an heir to a great keep to befriend the lowborn daughter of a widowed brewer and innkeep, but Wynne had wanted to learn sign language. Once her wariness of the highborn girl had worn off, Alyssum was glad to teach her because that meant she had one more person who spoke her language instead of expecting her to read their lips or erroneously assuming that being deaf had made her stupid. It was an assumption Alyssum had always taken advantage of, when the opportunity arose. However, that didn’t mean she didn’t resent those who thought all deaf people must be stupid because they lacked one of the five senses. _I don’t miss my hearing_, Alyssum had confided in her when they were children. _Why would I mourn the loss of something I have no memory of? It’s only hearing people who think I’m missing something because I can’t hear like they do_.

Wynne huffed and signed, “You know me too well.” Alyssum had always said she slept as though she had one foot in the grave.

One of the kitchen girls brought her a tray of roasted potatoes, fruit, and buttery hotcakes. Wynne thus broke her fast in bed whilst another labor pain ensued. Salvia and Alyssum ate with her, the clatter of their utensils against their plates a cacophony. Then she cleaned her teeth, bathed, put cream on her dry and chafed skin because the magic burnout had made her remiss in her skincare rituals for almost two moons, and changed into a clean cotton chemise once the cream had been subsumed by her flesh. Neither of her companions were fazed by her nudity, since midwifery often involved putting one’s hands inside of pregnant women. Salvia had brought her into the world, and Wynne had often swum naked in the shallows of the Yarrow Water or the Burn of Barrow with Alyssum when they were children. So the apprentice midwife had seen it all before. Albeit in a more youthful and less gravid configuration.

Wynne meticulously braided her damp hair over her shoulder and forewent smallclothes altogether; her soiled nightclothes and bedding had been scooped up and carried off by a chambermaid during her bath, the bedsheets changed and a thick length of rope dangled from a hook embedded in the ceiling. It was a rope she would be clinging to while she gave birth standing up.

This wasn’t something noblewomen did, but Wynne had seen how much lower the infant mortality rate was among commoners. Although the overall death rate was much higher for smallfolk, lowborn children died of disease or starvation or drinking contaminated water more often than still in the cradle. Wynne had surmised that one contributing factor was perhaps the birthing bed, because giving birth abed meant gravity couldn’t do some of the work.

Of course there were other variables—the constitution and health of the mother herself was a very significant factor—but this particular thing was something Wynne had a semblance of control over, and she had clung to that as she would soon cling to the rope. For she had no intention of losing this war. Or any other.

* * *

Roose was at his desk reading through reports from his steward when a servant approached him.

“My lord,” the young man bowed to him clumsily. “We’ve received a raven from the Holt Tower. Lady Agnes Blackwood is coming up the Weeping Water in a small cog,” he said. “with the heir to Raventree and several others.” Only he failed to enunciate certain words properly, thus sounding as though he had mud in his mouth: _M’lord. W’ve receiv’d a raven fr’m the Holt T’wer. Lady A’nes Blackwood is comin’ up th’ Weepin’ Wate’ ’n a sm’ll cog, w’th th’ heir t’ Raventree ‘n’ sev’ral othe’s_.

Roose glanced up and gave a curt nod. This wasn’t unexpected. Lord Tytos Blackwood had sent him a message that he received upon his return to the Dreadfort informing him of such an impending arrival. “Have the guards open the Weeping Gates,” he ordered before he finished reading the last of the reports.

During the fabled Age of Heroes, House Blackwood ruled the wolfswood in the North. Soon after the Long Night, the Starks drove the Blackwoods from the forest. It was so long ago that only the gods and greenseers knew the wolfswood had once been known by another name. House Blackwood ruled in the Riverlands as petty kings until the coming of the Andals, feuding with House Bracken for a thousand years before they formed an alliance and were defeated in the Battle of the Bitter River. Although the Brackens converted to the Faith of the Seven, House Blackwood kept faith with the old gods.

Benedict Rivers, a bastard of House Blackwood and House Bracken known as Benedict the Bold or Benedict the Just, eventually reigned as King Benedict I Justman during the Age of the Hundred Kingdoms. House Justman ruled the Riverlands for three centuries as Kings of the Trident before the death of King Benarr II Justman at the hands of Qhored I Hoare, known as Qhored the Cruel. Arlan III Durrandon supported Lord Roderick Blackwood in his uprising against Humfrey I Teague, a King of the Rivers and the Hills. Lord Roderick perished in the Battle of Six Kings fought near the Teats. Because the river lords were reticent to crown his gooddaughter Lady Shiera Blackwood as their queen regnant, the Storm King added the Riverlands to the domain of House Durrandon. Shiera Blackwood did become queen, but not queen in her own right.

When the ironborn reavers invaded the Riverlands three centuries later, Lady Agnes Blackwood—the namesake of Wynne’s grandmother—led the rivermen into battle against them until the Blackwoods were betrayed by Lord Lothar Bracken and Lady Agnes was slain by King Harwyn Hoare, who conquered the Riverlands and usurped the Storm King Arrec Durrandon.

House Blackwood supported House Targaryen during the Conquest and rose up against Harwyn Hardhand’s grandson Harren the Black. Alas, both House Blackwood and House Bracken had been weakened by one of the many private wars fought between them a decade prior to the Conquest, so Aegon the Conqueror made the Lord of Riverrun the first Lord Paramount of the Trident. Queen Visenya officiated a double ceremony during which she wed the heir to Raventree Hall to a lady of House Bracken, and wed his sister to the heir to Stone Hedge in a futile attempt to end the feud and breed out some of the bad blood between the two families.

Lord Royce Blackwood supported the claim of Ser Laenor Velaryon at the Great Council of 101 AC. Samwell Blackwood, his son and half-brother to Black Aly, fought a duel over Rhaenyra in 112 AC, the year before his half-sister was born. House Blackwood declared for Queen Rhaenyra during the Dance of the Dragons, as had Lord Cregan Stark. Whilst House Bracken declared for Aegon the Usurper. At the Battle of the Burning Mill in 129 AC, Ser Amos Bracken slew Lord Samwell in single combat before he was slain with a weirwood arrow shot through the slit in his helm by the vengeful Black Aly. Prince Daemon Targaryen captured Stone Hedge with a force of Darrys, Freys, Pipers, and Rootes and thus ended the civil war in the Riverlands with a victory of the blacks over the greens.

Black Aly, her nephew Lord Benjicot Blackwood, a boy lord of fourteen who earned the name Bloody Ben while on campaign, and Lord Royce’s bastard Red Robb Rivers, the Bowman of Raventree, fought in the Battle by the Lakeshore and in the Second Battle of Tumbleton, and led the rivermen in the Battle of the Kingsroad alongside Lord Kermit Tully, his brother Ser Oscar, and Lady Sabitha Frey in 130 AC. Bloody Ben and the Lads broke the flank of the royalist greens under the command of Lord Borros Baratheon on the Kingsroad while the archers led by his aunt felled the knights and unhorsed the Storm Lord. It was Robb Rivers who slew the Kingmaker, Ser Criston Cole, with one of his raven-fletched weirwood arrows at the Butcher’s Ball.

Lord Cregan ruled the realm during the Hour of the Wolf, which in actuality had lasted six days while he waited for responses to the peace terms offered to Lord Lyonel Hightower, Lady Johanna Lannister, and Lady Elenda Baratheon by Lord Corlys Velaryon. During the Hour of the Wolf, the bloodthirsty Lord Cregan was named Hand of the King by the newly crowned Aegon the Dragonbane and he arrested two-and-twenty men whom he put on trial for treason before Princess Rhaena and Princess Baela intervened and convinced their half-brother to rename Lord Corlys as Hand of the King. After the civil war ended, Black Aly became the second wife of Lord Cregan in exchange for Aegon III upholding the full pardon offered to Lord Corlys by Queen Alicent Hightower and Larys Clubfoot. Ser Gyles Belgrave and Lord Larys were executed, while the others chose to take the black. Lord Cregan beheaded them himself with Ice, the Valyrian steel greatsword of the House Stark.

Black Aly married Lord Cregan in the godswood at Winterfell in 132 AC and gave him four daughters before she died and he remarried. One of those daughters had married into House Bolton five generations back. Another had wed the Lord of Barrowton, while her sisters had married into House Umber and House Flint. Lady Melantha Blackwood, a granddaughter of Bloody Ben, married into House Stark three generations after that and became the Lady of Winterfell. House Blackwood still had roots in the North that ran deep.

Lord Tytos, the current head of House Blackwood and Lord of Raventree Hall, was a great-great-grandson of Bloody Ben; Tytos was named for Tytos Lannister by his grandmother Lady Tabitha Tully, a Lannister of Casterly Rock by birth. Ser Brynden Blackwood, his eldest son, was heir to Raventree Hall. Lord Tytos had been widowed by his first wife and left without issue. Then he remained in mourning for over a decade until he met Lady Mavis Vance, the only daughter of the Lord of Wayfarer’s Rest. Lady Mavis was younger than her lord husband by fifteen years, and she had given him seven children: six sons and a daughter. Their marriage was, by all accounts, a love match.

Wynne had spoken of her Blackwood cousins fondly and often. Brynden was a year older than Domeric, a knight who earned his spurs because he fought in border skirmishes between House Blackwood and House Bracken as a squire. Lucas, the second son, was a squire of age with Wynne who couldn’t beat her at cyvasse no matter how hard he tried and sulked when he lost, which she found amusing or tedious depending on whether or not he attempted to take his disgruntlement out on her. Hoster, called Hos, was fourteen and bookish. Wynne exchanged letters with him once a week, most of which consisted of book discussions or discourse on scholarly debates that had been argued for centuries by maesters and septons. Edmund, called Ben, was a boy of ten serving as page and cupbearer to Lady Shella at Harrenhal. Alyn, his twin, had been fostered with their granduncle Lord Norbert Vance at Atranta. Bethany, the only daughter, was a girl of six with a penchant for climbing trees and collecting things. Robert, the fifth and youngest son, was a boy of two with a fragile constitution. Lord Tytos and Lady Agnes had younger twin brothers as well. Ser Benedick and Ser Abelard, both of whom had wives and children of their own. Ser Benedick wed a lesser Royce and they had four errant sons and a daughter: Ser Sebastian, Ser Edmyn, Ser Caderyn, Ser Herrick, and Lady Imogene. Ser Abelard had married a Bracken in a futile attempt to breed some of the enmity out of both their bloodlines and they had three daughters: Lady Belinda, Lady Tabitha, and Lady Agnessa.

Then there were the four Dowagers of Raventree Hall: Lady Agnes Blackwood, Wynne’s paternal grandmother, a skinchanger accompanied by a massive unkindness of ravens. Lady Celia Tully, second wife and widow of Lord Brynden Blackwood, who served as cupbearer to Aegon the Unlikely in her youth before her betrothal to Prince Jaehaerys was broken. Lady Morgana Blackwood, widow of Lord Edmyn Tully and mother of Lord Hoster Tully and Ser Brynden the Blackfish. Betha Blackwood, queen consort and widow of Aegon V Targaryen, mother of the Prince of Dragonflies, Jaehaerys II Targaryen, Princess Shaera Targaryen, Prince Daeron the Dauntless, and Princess Rhaelle, the Dowager of Storm’s End, widow of Lord Ormund Baratheon and grandmother of the king.

Whilst she technically still held the title of Queen Dowager, the reclusive Betha had no power at court because she hadn’t left Raventree Hall since the death of her younger son Jaehaerys the Clever in 262 AC. Not even during the Defiance of Duskendale or Robert’s Rebellion. It was Rhaelle who ruled the Stormlands as the lady of the castle alongside Ser Cortnay Penrose, the castellan of the keep, while Lord Renly sat on the small council in King’s Landing and played at being Master of Laws.

Lady Morgana, her younger sister, had returned to Raventree after her lord husband perished at the Stepstones because the elder of her sons was two-and-twenty and thus old enough to rule as Lord of Riverrun and Lord Paramount of the Trident without a regent. Ser Brynden, already a knight at sixteen, had gone to Raventree with his mother to avoid his brother’s attempts to betroth him to Lady Bethany Redwyne. Lord Hoster Tully called him the black goat of the Tully flock, and since the sigil of House Tully was a fish, Ser Brynden had become the Blackfish. When his goodsister Lady Minisa gave birth to a stillborn son, the Blackfish and Lady Morgana returned to Riverrun. After the Lady Minisa died, Brynden remained at Riverrun with Morgana acting as the lady of the castle until Hoster betrothed Lysa Tully to Jon Arryn. Brynden swore his sword and shield to the Lord of the Eyrie and Hoster disowned him. Lady Morgana remained with her granddaughters at Riverrun during the Rebellion and witnessed the birth of her great-grandson Robb Stark. When the war had ended, she returned to Raventree Hall whilst her younger son accompanied her younger granddaughter to King’s Landing and her elder granddaughter went North to Winterfell. Edmure, her grandson, was left alone at Riverrun with his lord father.

Celia Tully had been wed to a widowed lord thirty years older than herself after her betrothal to Prince Jaehaerys was broken. However, from everything Wynne had told him, Celia had grown to love Brynden Blackwood with all her heart. Lord Brynden had perished at the Stepstones as well, and Celia had remained at Raventree Hall rather than return to Riverrun because Tytos had been widowed and lost the son his wife had been attempting to birth in one fell swoop. Celia was acting Lady of Raventree Hall despite technically holding the title of Dowager until her eldest son remarried over a decade later, but she had remained at Raventree after that in the company of her children and grandchildren. Thus was Raventree overrun with Blackwoods.

Roose glanced up when a beak tapped against his windowpane; he stood and emerged from behind his desk to crack the window open, holding out his arm for the raven to perch on as he checked its legs to see if the bird was carrying a message. No scroll was tied at its feet, but it spoke to him.

“Lord Bolton,” the raven greeted in a raucous female voice. It was a voice that brought the caws of crows to mind, tinged with a self-assurance that came with age—and with survival. Lady Agnes Blackwood had survived ruling the Barrowlands alone at the age of eighteen whilst her lord husband fought in the War of the Ninepenny Kings, the epidemic of winter fever that had taken her lord husband from her, and the loss of her only son. Wynne descended from a long unbroken line of powerful women.

Roose watched the black eyes of the raven flicker white before he replied, “Lady Agnes. Have you come to witness the birth of your great-grandsons?”

“We’ve come to witness the birth of the first greenseer born to another greenseer,” said the youngest Dowager of Raventree. “I trust you have proper accommodations for us?”

Roose nodded brusquely as the raven cocked its head quizzically at him. Strangely, its beak didn’t move at all even though Lady Agnes was speaking through its mouth. “Of course, my lady,” he said. Then he began to sign one-handed to the chambermaid whom he assumed had come to see if his chamber pot needed emptying to have tea prepared and water heated for baths. “How many are with you?”

“Forty in all,” Lady Agnes informed him, “ten Blackwoods, five household knights to guard us, and a crew of five-and-twenty.”

Roose didn’t bother to sign all of that, since the chambermaid wasn’t deaf. It appeared she wasn’t perturbed by a talking raven, either. Which made him smile more to himself than at her. That seemed to frighten her. Which made his smile metamorphose into a wide self-indulgent grin suffused with amusement. “I’ve opened the Weeping Gates,” he said, “the Weeping Water runs through the City of Weeping into the Dreadfort. Shall I meet you in the Subterranean Hall and escort you to the guest chambers?”

“I think not, my lord,” Lady Agnes said imperiously, “you will escort me to my granddaughter.”

* * *

Beneath the Dreadfort lurked the Subterranean Hall, its walls and curved ceiling constructed entirely of pink granite while the floor was made of polished black and white granite slabs. Lanterns hung on chains from the ceiling and torches lined the walls every three feet, the flames illuminating glints like stars trapped in the stone. Still, because it was pink and glowing red in the firelight, the Subterranean Hall was colloquially known as the Bowels.

Although the castle town surrounding the fortress was too far inland to ever be considered a port, small vessels could sail up the Weeping Water with supplies from White Harbor. These vessels had come even more frequently once Wynne had brought over the glassblowers and glaziers from Myr, and they bore that glass from the North throughout the realm as his wife knew they would. It had made the Myrish craftsmen rich, and House Bolton even richer.

It was rare for Roose to welcome noble visitors in the Bowels. This was potentially a weak point in the fortress, and thus was very well-guarded: the gateways in the outer and inner castle walls had been fortified with not one but four thick bronze-plated latticed iron grates. Since bronze wasn’t prone to rust, the softer metal had been plated over the harder iron underneath to protect it from eroding underwater. In times of war, heavy bronze-plated iron shipbreaker chains were strung under the surface of the river between the walls of the town and walls of the fortress itself.

Barbrey stood beside him with her shoulders back and spine ramrod straight, the torchlight turning the threads of grey in her brown hair to silver and sunstreaks in the brown to copper and gold; a widow’s knot was twisted at the nape of her neck, her lips thinned with stress that accentuated the lines around her mouth and upon her brow.

“If you keep frowning,” Roose murmured, “your face will get stuck that way.” Then he smirked as her frown deepened. “Or so my lady mother used to say.”

Barbrey sighed heavily, but refused to permit her shoulders to slump. “Lady Agnes was nothing but good and kind to me in spite of everything,” she told him with an uncharacteristic softness in her voice, “but I essentially banished her from Barrow Hall after Ned Stark returned the horse I gave Willam to me. I feared that she would overshadow me as Lady of Barrowton and thus deprive me of the only thing I had left, so I told her to leave once we learned Ned Stark had left my lord’s bones in Dorne because that meant we had nothing to burn and bury.”

Roose wisely said nothing in response. Although he was tempted to rub salt in the open wound Barbrey had just shown him, he managed to restrain himself. Wynne needed her mother and grandmother by her side, and pitting them against each other for his own amusement would displease her. It was still magnificently ironic that Barbrey had broken the Widow’s Law that Wynne had cited to defer her birthright and permit her mother to rule Barrowton after she came of age. Which had caused quite the scandal two years ago, after word of the deferment had spread all throughout the North. At the time, Domeric had said Wynne had done so merely to deter her more determined suitors from seeking to claim the lordship of the Barrowlands by courting her. Now that he knew her much better, Roose knew beyond all doubt that Wynne simply had no ambition.

It wasn’t as though she aspired to nothing, of course. Wynne dreamed of building roads and banks, of a future in which young women were permitted to study at the Citadel and forge a chain without crossdressing—as many had throughout history—and of amending the laws of the realm so that skinchangers could not be slain with impunity for being what they were. However, she did not aspire to rule. Wynne had been the last of her father’s line for as long as she could remember. Thus, it didn’t matter to her _when_ she became the Lady Regnant of Barrowton, because it was a foregone conclusion that she _would_.

Agnes Blackwood descended from the open upper deck of a small cog whose hull was carved of weirwood rather than oak, the single square-rigged sail of which bore the sigil of House Blackwood: a dead weirwood on black surrounded by a scarlet orle festooned with a volant unkindness of ravens. It wasn’t by any means a warship, but Roose caught sight of the dozens of eerily oversized ravens that had roosted in the crow’s nest—any pirates or raiders who attempted to capture the vessel would have their eyes pecked out before they had a chance to board the _Lady Melissa_. Euron Greyjoy had learned that lesson shortly before Agnes murdered him. From her shoulders fluttered a cloak of black feathers reminiscent of dark wings. Beneath was a richly embroidered velvet gown, silver and bone white thread on arterial red. There was more salt than pepper in her greying black hair and crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. Upon her shoulder perched a pied raven that sat very still despite being jostled as she moved. Agnes had a wildness about her in spite of her immaculate posture, something utterly intractable and untamed. It was plain to see from whom his lady wife had inherited her withering stare. Barbrey might have banished her, but Agnes had left Barrowton only because she chose to do so. Elsewise, she would have remained in the wooden city.

Escorting her down the gangplank was a gangly boy with a cowlick at his temple who towered over her from a height of almost seven feet of legs and shins and elbows. This could only be Hoster Blackwood, for he carried a worn leather bag that bulged with books over his shoulder and a bundle of scrolls under his other arm. Hoster was thin and gawky with a long hook nose, messy tendrils of black hair tied half up with a leather cord, and hazel eyes with more brown than green in them. Agnes had those same forest eyes, as did Wynne.

“Lord Bolton,” the rawboned boy greeted with a smile devoid of guile and bowed as best he could with a cumbersome bag slung over his shoulder, “I’m Hoster.”

“Hos, we call him,” an older boy added from a few steps behind his brother on the gangplank before he introduced himself. Roose gave him a cursory glance and sussed out half a dozen throwing daggers concealed on his person. “I’m Lucas.”

“Brynden,” said the heir to Raventree Hall curtly.

All three of them stood over six and a half feet tall, and they possessed the fine Tully cheekbones Roose had seen in Lady Catelyn’s and Sansa’s face as well as the same long nose. Lucas was broader than his more bookish younger brother in the shoulders and chest and he kept his black hair a bit shorter. Brynden was lean but muscular and he wore a stern expression, his gaze shrewd under the dark slashes of his eyebrows. Each had a dowager on his arm. Celia Tully was two-and-seventy with no auburn left in her grey tresses, her eyes a bright and vivid blue in her softly wrinkled face. Morgana Blackwood had stooped with age enough that she needed a cane to walk fashioned of weirwood in the shape of a tree whose tangled roots formed an elongated base, her thin shoulders gnarled and spine bent. Roose had met the Blackfish on campaign during Robert’s Rebellion, and his mother resembled him in the angles of her face and set of her jaw.

Then, on the arm of a young man whom Roose assumed was a more distant cousin of Wynne’s, came Betha Blackwood. At seven-and-ninety, the queen dowager was a wizened crone with thinning long white hair braided into a widow’s knot similar to the style Barbrey always wore but with raven feathers woven into the braids. Roose had never met such an old lady before. Most noblewomen didn’t even live half a century, but Betha was almost a centenarian. Despite the slight hunch in her shoulders and back and hands knurled with arthritis, her posture was regal as she descended the gangplank and watched him through the thick eyeglasses perched on her nose. It was Roose who bowed to her, deeply and with the utmost respect. “Your Grace,” he said.

Betha snorted. “I suppose you’ll do,” she proclaimed, her voice a rasp.

This was high praise, Roose deduced. Behind her came three ladies, who curtsied to him.

“I’m Edmyn,” said the young man with a wide grin that looked very much like an implicit threat. Ser Edmyn Blackwood, second son of Ser Benedick Blackwood and Lady Beatrice Royce. “These lovely girls are my sweet sister Imogene and our cousins, Belinda and Tabitha.”

“Bel,” a tall slim lady who couldn’t have been much older than Wynne corrected him sharply before she turned to Roose and smiled. With all of her teeth. “Short for Belinda the Bellicose.”

“I am called Bitha,” said her studious younger sister, whom Roose knew was a bit younger than Wynne. Everything about her appearance was irreproachable: not a hair out of place in her tight bun despite the wind at sea, her gown modest with a high collar and subtle embroidery, her boots polished and unscuffed. Which reminded him of the façade Wynne had worn, a lady’s armor.

Imogene said nothing, merely glared at her eldest brother out of the corner of her eye and kept her expression akin to stone.

Agnes had moved to stand in front of Barbrey, who did her best not to flinch. “I might have slipped into your skin and driven you stark raving mad as a parting gift,” she whispered, “had I not missed Raventree Hall.”

Barbrey suppressed a shudder, with difficulty. Roose didn’t bother to conceal his smirk. “Welcome to the Dreadfort,” he whispered.

* * *

“Gods be good,” Hoster blurted as Phineas held the door to her chambers open so that he could make his entrance. “You’re huge, Wynnie.”

Wynne valiantly resisted the urge to roll her eyes at her cousin for merely stating the obvious as the Blackwoods flocked into the room. It was setting her teeth on edge to witness the manner in which her mother and grandmother were almost preternaturally aware of and wary of each other. Something they were both cognizant of but that her mother was fastidiously ignoring whilst her grandmother was looking for a loose thread, presumably in the hopes of instigating an unraveling of sorts. _Not tonight_, she thought, for afternoon had sunk into dusk while she languished in the early throes of labor. _Please. Not tonight. Or tomorrow, if this persists until then_. Roose caught her eye and held her gaze for a moment, and it startled her to see that he was fretful over her. Beneath his implacable façade was a worried press of his mouth between his lips, a tightness in his shaven jaw, a minute pinch between his eyebrows. Wynne had become rather fluent in reading his microexpressions by now and she mustered a smile in the hope of reassuring him, biting her bottom lip shyly once he returned her smile with one of his own and went to stand by her bedside. Although he kept his hands folded in front of him to stop himself from touching her, his mere presence and proximity was enough to assuage the worst of her anxiety. “I am still not so huge as you, Hos,” she retorted before she asked, “How tall are you now?”

“Six feet, nine and a quarter inches,” answered Hoster.

“Maester Medwick says he’s still growing,” Edmyn added, helpful as ever.

“Like a weed,” Bel chimed in with a wide grin that was half feral. Darts were holstered in leather cuffs around her wrists that could be thrown with deadly accuracy in the event that she permitted an enemy to get close enough for combat, but all her cousins were proficient archers. Bloodraven had a personal guard he called the Raven’s Teeth. When he took the black, those guardsmen and women remained at Raventree as part of the castle guard. Now those guards were known as the Raven’s Teeth. Ser Abelard, Bel’s father, had been the commander of the Raven’s Teeth ever since he earned his spurs. Ser Benedict, his twin, was master-at-arms. Bel, her little sisters, and Imogene had learned to shoot both crossbow and longbow as every lady of House Blackwood had before them. Soon her cousin Bethany would learn to shoot with a real bow, not just toy arrows made of twigs with cloth arrowheads sewn onto them and stuffed with soft wool. Ser Granduncle Abelard had gifted Wynne the weirwood longbow that she used to hunt, when she wasn’t shooting with the crossbow Roose had given her. Someday, they would teach the twins how to shoot. If they were hale and healthy.

Wynne didn’t get a chance to respond before another labor pain overtook her and she winced at the paroxysms within her, squeezing her eyes closed as though she could hope to brace for impact from the outside even though her pain had germinated from the inside.

Alyssum held a pocketwatch in one hand and recorded the duration of the contraction once it had subsided. Salvia squinted at the paper. “We’re at two minutes apart now,” she signed and yelled simultaneously.

Wynne groaned softly and flapped her hands to attract the attention of the midwife. “Please don’t yell,” she signed. “Roose can interpret.”

Salvia began to speak only manually instead of verbally. “Anyone who doesn’t want to watch the midwife check the dilation of Wynne’s cervix needs to either turn around or leave the room,” Roose interpreted.

Thus did Bitha and Lucas abruptly leave the room. Closely followed by Edmyn, who held up his hands in mock surrender before he departed. Although none of the dowagers were perturbed by the minutiae of childbirth, they all left the room to change out of their heavy boots and traveling clothes. Only her grandmother remained by her side in a chair one of the servants had brought once it became apparent that her time in the birthing bed would be a crowded affair. Brynden and Hoster turned around and each attempted to make themselves as unobtrusive as possible, despite towering over all others in the room. “It’s been too long,” Brynden said as Hoster reached up and fingered the spine of a leatherbound tome. “We haven’t seen you since you were a little girl. Now look at you.”

Wynne gritted her teeth as Salvia checked the dilation of her cervix with gnarled fingers. Roose took one of her hands in both of his, brought her fingers to his lips and kissed her knuckles softly. Wynne squeezed as hard as she could whilst Alyssum dabbed at the sweat that had beaded on her brow and dripped copiously at the back of her neck. “I heard your betrothal to Lady Barbara fell through,” she murmured.

Lord Tytos and Lord Jonos had reluctantly agreed to betroth the heirs to Raventree Hall and Stone Hedge at the behest of Queen Rhaella, whom Mad King Aerys had confined to Maegor’s Holdfast but who had corresponded with her grandmother as often as she could in spite of her brother-husband. It was intended that Brynden and Barbara would be married and spend half the year at Raventree and half at Stone Hedge, so their children would grow up amongst their kin on both sides of the Red Fork and perhaps the feud would finally end.

Brynden shrugged, his back still to her. “Many a betrothal between Blackwood and Bracken has fallen through,” he said. “Bas is fonder of Lady Barb than I ever was.”

This fact made Bel snort. “If,” she muttered, “by fond, you mean he enjoyed riding her hard and putting her away wet. Barb is pregnant, and they wed beneath the dead weirwood at Raventree without her lord father’s consent to prevent the child from being born a bastard. Now she’s no longer heir to Stone Hedge and Lord Jonos is wroth.”

Roose couldn’t quite stifle a soft laugh at that, even though it was low-hanging fruit to compare a member of House Ryswell, House Bracken, or House Roote to a horse. Barbrey looked sidelong at him with judgment passing over her face while Agnes threw her head sharply back and cackled.

“So another Blackwood wed a Bracken,” said Hoster in a soft raconteur voice similar to the tone Wynne oft used. “There may be another war brewing betwixt Bracken and Blackwood over it, but it wouldn’t be the first time.”

Wynne gritted her teeth and breathed through her umpteenth labor pain as Roose maneuvered himself into bed with her before he began to massage her lower back. “Ngh,” she groaned inarticulately. Roose kissed her temple, soft and quick.

“Lord Jonos won’t start a war over his eldest daughter’s cunt,” Lady Agnes said matter-of-factly, “the man has always had more sense than pride. Jayne Bracken will marry Brynden in her sister’s place, as custom decrees.” Then, “What of your tryst with the Bastard of Bracken?” she asked. “Despite your longstanding betrothal to Ser Patrek.”

Bel shrugged and elegantly sat on the swooning couch, sweeping her skirts beneath her before she tucked one ankle behind the other. Bitha was more studious than either her elder or younger sister, but each of them had gotten the same lessons in ladylike deportment—and it showed, if only in her posture. “Ser Patrek’s tastes for wenches and wine is one of the worst-kept secrets in the Riverlands,” she retorted in a rather unladylike manner. “Why should I remain as pure as fresh snow whilst he dips his wick all he likes? It’s not as though I had a maidenhead for my future husband to take before Harry and I took a turn on the wrong side of the blanket, either. Mine was broken long ago in the saddle. I’m surprised that yours wasn’t, Wynnie.”

“No more surprised than I am,” Wynne muttered. Once, she took a hand mirror and looked at her cunt. It was rather odd to gaze upon what lay between her legs, but she had seen enough in the greenscape to know every cunt was different. Some virgins didn’t have a visible maidenhead obscuring their opening, while others had imperforate hymens like the one she possessed before she wed and still others had septate or microperforate hymens. It was just another part of the body; neither sacred nor profane.

Bel laughed aloud. Although she wasn’t a cackler, her laugh was no less raucous than her aunt’s. “I am not much for correspondence,” she murmured, “but I did miss you.”

“Eight centimeters,” Alyssum signed while her grandmother washed her hands in a basin and dried them off with a piece of undyed cloth.

Wynne heaved a sigh. “Two more centimeters before I’m fully dilated,” she mumbled and signed.

Brynden moved to sit at the foot of her featherbed atop the bedclothes while Hoster sat on the rolling ladder meant to navigate her bookcases and folded his long gangly legs underneath him on the wooden rungs. “How did you learn sign language?” he asked.

Roose knew the question was directed at him, not to Wynne. “My lady mother was deaf from birth,” he said without doing the deaf people in the room the courtesy of signing while he spoke verbally because he didn’t want to unhand his wife. “My forebearers had a habit of preemptively silencing their servants by cutting out their tongues until I discontinued those barbaric practices when I became the Lord of the Dreadfort. My lady mother used to teach them her language, and thus I learned as well. It’s quite useful when hunting, and in battle.”

“What of the flaying of your enemies?” the queen dowager asked him as she reentered the room and gracefully sat in another chair. This armchair was upholstered in black velvet instead of Bolton pink or red. “Have you given up those barbaric practices?”

Roose didn’t so much as flinch. “I cannot say, Your Grace,” he answered softly.

Agnes snorted. Barbrey had to stifle a scoff. Wynne arched her eyebrows at him. Then her eyes began to glow arcane green and Roose turned at the sound of the window unlatching to permit a crow to fly into the room and perch atop one of the bedposts. “Bloodraven,” Wynne said.

Betha peered at the blackbird from behind her thicker eyeglasses as its eyes flickered white. “Uncle Brynden,” she greeted him.

“My dear niece,” said Brynden Rivers, the greenseer once known throughout the realm as Lord Bloodraven. Although he and his sisters were among the Great Bastards whom Aegon the Unworthy legitimized on his deathbed, neither he nor Lady Mya or Lady Gwenys had laid claim to the surname Targaryen or the titles of prince and princess. Brynden had gone to court in King’s Landing while Mya remained at Raventree and Gwenys was fostered in the Reach, where she met her future husband. Most people only remembered four of the Great Bastards: Bloodraven, Shiera Seastar, Bittersteel, and Daemon I Blackfyre, the first and greatest of the five Blackfyre Pretenders.

All of the Blackwoods had grown up hearing the stories about Lord Bloodraven in particular: that he studied the black arts, that he shapechanged into a one-eyed dog or even turned into a mist, that grey wolf packs hunted down his enemies, and crows whispered secrets in his ears. Silence fell as the crow whose skin he wore flapped to land on the back of the chair upon which Queen Betha was seated and preened her flyaway hair. Even peering at Roose through a bird’s eyes, the gaze of the eldritch greenseer rooted him to the spot and he seemed to look right through his skin into his very soul. _A thousand eyes, and one_. When he ruled with spies and sorcery, people had whispered that he was a sorcerer and a bastard and a kinslayer, a white worm gnawing at the heart of the realm. If men needed someone to blame for their woes, they heaped the blame upon him. For no man loved a sorcerer. Or a sorceress. Wynne had slept through the aftermath of the Battle of the Haunted Forest, but many of those who survived blamed his wife for their suffering and for the very slaughter that she had done her utmost to prevent. It was a thankless task, being a greenseer. Roose had been sorely tempted to remove the tongues of the men who spoke ill of her in his hearing before they departed from Castle Black. Only the presence of the Starks had stayed his hand, because he knew that Robb would return to Winterfell and tell tales that would disturb Lord Eddard.

“Lord Bloodraven,” Roose greeted him in a voice a whisker above a whisper.

Bloodraven turned and tilted his avian head. “Lord Bolton,” he said before he turned his gaze on Wynne. “I come to bear witness to the birth of another, as the greenseers of old once did. There are too few left in the world for a proper gathering.”

Wynne nodded and winced as yet another labor pain stabbed at her, her face contorting from the agony. Despite this, she appeared unaffected by the overwhelming presence of her fellow greenseer. Wynne had grown accustomed to Bloodraven years ago, not long after he first appeared in her dreams in the form of a three-eyed crow. “I won’t name my son after you,” she murmured through very tightly clenched teeth.

Bloodraven seemed to smile, though no bird was capable of wearing such an expression. From the crow’s beak emerged a ghastly sound that might’ve been a chuckle. “There are some named for me, still,” he said and cocked his head at her cousin Brynden. “Not so many as before. Men forget.”

“Only the trees remember,” Wynne said in a hushed tone so the words sounded almost like a ritual or perhaps a prayer. “A thousand eyes.”

“A hundred skins,” Bloodraven said, “wisdom as deep as the roots of ancient trees.”

“We remember what the realms of men have forgotten,” Wynne said, “that is both our blessing and our curse.”


	38. A Woman’s War {IV}

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Skin in the Game_  
**Book 2**  
Chapter 13: A Woman’s War {IV}
> 
> Sansa and Domeric grow a bit closer, Rogar and Avery are born, and Roose has far too many feelings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *scuttles in and posts an update*
> 
> Thank you to those who commented saying how much you love my story and (re)reading it helped you during quarantine. I’m still depressed as hell, but here’s a chapter for you all. ♥
> 
> *scuttles back out again*

**In childhood, I thought  
that pain meant  
I was not loved.  
It meant I loved.**

Louise Glück, “First Memory”

* * *

☙ **ⅩⅩⅩⅠⅠ** ❧

298 AC

_At the Dreadfort, the ancestral stronghold of House Bolton, on the banks of the Weeping Water in the North, one of the nine constituent regions in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros_

* * *

Sansa had expected to find Domeric in the hall outside Wynne’s chambers or even in her chambers preparing for the birth of his brothers with the others. Instead she found him in his chambers with his harp, plucking at the strings experimentally with his fingers while he attempted to put a poem to music. Every so often he extricated himself from his embrace with the instrument to dip a raven feather quill in a jar of ink and pen a handful of notes on the pages of the leatherbound book in which he recorded his compositions.

In the months since her arrival at the Dreadfort, Sansa had decorated her chambers with heavy silk brocade curtains adorned with intricate embroidery and an assortment of delicate porcelain teacups patterned with flowers atop matching saucers. These she filled with fragrant dried petals that imbued her rooms with a sweet subtle scent. Lady Poole and Septa Mordane had bought her cups and saucers every year since her third nameday until her collection had flourished.

Domeric had decorated his chambers with books and blades. Upon one stone wall, a huge painting of horses at play in the snow was hung. In the lower left-hand corner were three unobtrusive but elegant letters overlapping each other: the initials _BRB_, Bethany Ryswell Bolton. There was a fluffy softness in the brushstrokes that formed the snow, and an equine grace captured within the forms of the horses themselves.

On another wall a tapestry depicting the Battle of Weeping Water hung, the banners of House Bolton and House Stark flying stitched with centuries old faded thread. Domeric kept his sword and dagger by his bedside, each sheath dangling from his bedpost. On display were his more unusual blades, weapons from overseas and from history itself: a sword made of bronze with a hooked shape, a longsword with a double edge at its point that was meant to give the wielder the ability to slash and chop as though he wielded both sword and battle axe, a sword with runes carved into the flexible steel once wielded by the First Men kings who ruled Bolton lands so long ago, a short curved knife capable of removing limbs with a single blow, a sword made for stabbing with a double edge, a triangular knife forged of copper, daggers with blades like the claws of some great cat, folding blades whose handles oft concealed two knives instead of one, dirks and decorative blades with ornate sheathes. These were offset by his comparably modest collection of dulcimers in different shapes and sizes with different numbers of strings.

In a reading nook lit by a small wooden chandelier fashioned of carved antlers, a red leather chair so large it could seat two people comfortably stood between a pair of bookshelves. One bookshelf was packed with thick volumes of history, while the other contained only songbooks and books of poetry bound in embossed leather. Domeric was a poet himself, but he was too shy to compose music for his own poetry. Sansa had attempted to coax him into reading some of his poetry to her on many occasions, to no avail.

Wynne had confided that Domeric never showed his poetry to her, either. Albeit because she did not have a poetic bone in her body and he thought she could not appreciate it as he did._ Wynne can sing quite well_, Domeric had explained with utmost fondness in his tone, _but that is where her artistic talent ends. If she draws or paints, the drawings are so tragically bad that her artwork showed no signs of improvement year after year until her instructor simply gave up. Without magic, I highly doubt she would be able to carry a tune. Nor can she play an instrument. There is a lyricism to poetry that eludes her, a musicality she cannot grasp and subsequently resents_.

Rarely had Sansa heard Wynne sing, but she was artistic in other ways: she designed and sewed and embroidered most of her gowns, crafted knitwear and blankets and toys fashioned of woolen yarn, and invented both flavorful and medicinal teas. Were these achievements not artistic, or was it merely that men excluded the work of women from their definition of artistry?

Wynne had taught her to question _everything_, Sansa realized. Although not for the first time.

_Are they my father’s bastards?_ Sansa had asked the Lady of the Dreadfort at the first opportunity without preamble or pleasantries.

Wynne sat abed fending off Lady whilst the direwolf licked her face, since a wolfish greeting oft involved attempting to slip the entire tongue inside another’s mouth and Sansa had not yet trained her well enough to quell such animalistic behavior. Then her laughter abruptly withered, her gaze seeming to sharpen as she turned and Sansa had to steel herself to avoid flinching or freezing up from the sheer raw force of that stare. Wynne had sighed as Lady rolled over to show her belly and abdomen, an act of lupine submission.

_I saw them in the flames of the glass candle_, Sansa had said. _Aly and Jon, and their dragons_.

Wynne had made a rather unladylike noise, air hissing out in between her clenched teeth in a sound that resembled a sigh but was not so melancholy as that. _No_, she answered, _but they are your father’s children. Whilst they were born of another man’s seed, they are of his blood and yours_.

_So Aunt Lyanna was their mother, then_. Sansa had swallowed hard as the weight of the bittersweet truth sank deeper in. _Rhaegar Targaryen was their father_.

Wynne had nodded. _Rhaegar and Lyanna met at Summerhall when he was fourteen and she was nine_, she explained, _Lyanna was fostered with her aunt at Amberly. There was some correspondence between them, frequent letters sent in secret because Mad King Aerys in his paranoia would likely have considered Lyanna a threat to his heir’s marriage prospects due to her lack of Valyrian blood. Rhaegar was betrothed to Princess Elia Martell after his father’s overzealous search for a bride of Valyrian blood overseas was tragically ended with the shipwreck of Steffon and Cassana Baratheon, and he hoped to make Lyanna his second wife as Aegon the Conqueror did with Visenya and Rhaenys once she came of age._

_Lyanna had no such hopes, nor did she have any desire to become a pawn in her father’s plans and be married off to Robert Baratheon. If given the choice, I think she would have chosen never to marry at all. Alas, your late aunt was made to choose between Robert and Rhaegar, and thus Lyanna absconded with her friend and confidant rather than marry the man her father and brother had foisted upon her without her consent or approval._

_Rhaegar once believed he was the one that was promised—a prince whose coming was foretold in the prophecy that prompted Jaehaerys the Clever to marry his children to each other—but in time he had an epiphany that one of his children would be the promised one instead. According to his interpretation of the prophecy, he needed to sire three children. Thus, he believed he must father another child and he required a mother for that child_.

_But why her?_ Sansa had asked. _If Aunt Lyanna didn’t love him, why choose her?_

Wynne had gnawed on the inside of her cheek, as she always did when attempting to articulate something. It was a nervous habit that seemed most unladylike to Sansa, but refinement was not her concern at the moment. _Lyanna did love the prince_, Wynne opined, _and I think he felt the same. Alas, sometimes even true love is not enough to give a true story a happy ending_.

Upon hearing that, Sansa felt the lump in her throat she had not quite swallowed grow heavier. It almost made her want to ask how the stories that she loved so had ended, but living with a greenseer had taught her to never ask a question unless she truly wanted to know the answer.

“Why aren’t you with her?”

Domeric turned at the sound of her voice and smiled at her with a tinge of sorrow. “There have still been scant rumors that I am cuckolding my father despite my best efforts,” he explained dolorously. Lady padded over to him and sat elegantly before him on her haunches when he smiled wider and scratched her ears the way she liked. “I fear my presence in the birthing chamber would only serve to fan such flames.”

Sansa valiantly suppressed a scowl, even though watching her betrothed lavish her direwolf with attention made her feel all nice and warm inside. It vexed her that someone would spread unsubstantiated rumors without caring whether or not they contained a single grain of truth, even though she knew her father had used precisely that tendency to protect Aly and Jon. Sansa had no memory of her father ever outright saying the twins were his children. Instead he claimed that Aly and Jon were of his blood, and everyone assumed he meant the twins were of his seed. Sansa knew not whether her father had anticipated that outcome, but now she knew how malleable the truth could truly be.

Domeric gently extricated himself from his harp to avoid toppling it with a wayward elbow and gestured with a graceful sweep of his strong arm for her to sit beside him. Sansa delicately swept her skirts beneath her as she took a seat, thrilling at the prospect of his thigh against hers even with layers of fabric tempering the touch. When he leaned into her so their bodies were touching from shoulder to knee, her heart fluttered so hard she felt as though she were flying high enough to gasp for breath. There was nothing particularly illicit about the manner in which he was touching her, but it was hardly appropriate…and yet she never wanted him to stop.

“Will you sing for me?” he asked her in a tone of voice that Sansa had never before heard from her betrothed. It was soft and strangely agonizing, bordering on helpless. Was he thinking of his brothers, of the boys whose little bones lay beneath the Dreadfort with their lady mother? At once her trembling heart stopped flittering and began to ache for Domeric. “Mayhaps a hymn to the Mother?”

Sansa nodded because she did not trust herself to speak, and she began to sing in her sweetest voice as Domeric took her hand in his and silently prayed to both the old gods and the new whom she knew he did not believe in.

* * *

Wynne groggily recalled her labor in a painful haze after the fact. It had gone on for hours that felt much longer in her mind, so much so that her erratic sense of time had gotten even worse. Roose had to shout that her umbilical cord had prolapsed in between the birth of the elder and younger twin because her eyes had been squeezed tightly shut and thus she couldn’t see what Salvia or Alyssum were saying to her in sign language.

At some point, she made water on herself and defecated in the birthing bed. Salvia had wiped her clean and placed a warm cloth on her perineum to prevent vaginal tearing. Alyssum kept yelling that she could not push, even though her body was screaming at her that she must. When her firstborn was crowning, the stinging and burning sensation within her tore sobs from her throat in shreds as she clung to the rope and howled.

Roose and her cousins—though she couldn’t say precisely who—had excruciatingly turned her over and maneuvered her so that she was facedown with her weight on her elbows, knees and chest, and her eyeglasses had gone askew whilst she worked magic to keep Avery from being strangled by the cord. Barbrey held her hand through it all, her numbingly tight grip a fulcrum. Then had come the afterbirth. Wynne vaguely remembered her husband blithely telling her that his forebearers were placentophages—they ate their afterbirth, serving half to the mother and half to the father. It hurt to laugh, her entire body shaking with shivers as Roose gathered her into his arms before he tucked her into bed. There was no lingering smell of urine or feces, so the sheets and pallet had been replaced with clean bedding.

Newborn babies had cone-shaped heads, puffy eyes and swollen genitalia. Wynne knew their skin had been coated with vernix and lanugo in the aftermath of their coming into the world, though Alyssum and Salvia had bathed the twins before the midwives presented her sons to her.

Both had full heads of black hair and skin devoid of freckles. Their eyes were open, and it was obvious which twin was Rogar because his eyes were pale grey like his father’s whilst Avery had the red eyes of a greenseer. Both of them looked at her, but Rogar had an unfocused gaze she knew was characteristic of most babies. Avery was eerily focused on her face, and he began to cry until Alyssum handed him to her. Then he abruptly stopped crying and nestled into her arms, still watching her with his bloodred eyes. Rogar started to cry when his brother did, but he didn’t stop until she unlaced the bodice of her shift and offered him a nipple.

Wynne had no milk for them yet, but colostrum would suffice; they latched onto her breasts and suckled as Roose kissed her sweaty forehead and held a cup of cool water to her lips, from which she weakly guzzled as much as she could. Bloodraven was still in the body of a crow, watching her from where he perched atop one of her bookshelves. Although she was too exhausted to glower at him, she clutched her sons close to her body and hunched as if to shield them. “These are _my_ children,” she whispered ferociously, her voice but a wisp on her tongue. “I will not have you steal that from them as you stole my childhood from me. Avery is _mine_, not yours.”

Roose had never seen his wife so desperate before. It reminded him of a wound ripped open only once the laceration had begun to heal, blood gushing forth so beautifully. Wynne had told him of how Bloodraven had come to her in her dreams and cracked the world open. At seven, she was too young to understand the consequences of seeing the unseen. Now, on the cusp of her eighteenth nameday, his lady was still quite young in years; but she was ancient in a manner only a greenseer could be. Roose knew he would never truly comprehend the arcane part of her that was paradoxically timeless and timeworn. Bloodraven had forced her third eye open and forced her to grow up much too soon. Wynne feared he would do the same to their sons because of their shared history.

Bloodraven watched her with an unfathomable familiarity, a kinship that defied all definition rooted so deep within them both that neither blade nor sharp word could ever cut it out; it was the look of a man gazing upon the embodiment of his past and his future. Which made Roose feel as though he were trespassing not only in his own fortress but in his own marriage, and he misliked that so much it galled him.

“Kindly see yourself out, my lord,” he said in his softest voice.

Bloodraven nevertheless heard and heeded, dark wings flapping as the crow whose form he inhabited took flight. Wynne slumped even further back against the pillows behind her before she looked up into his eyes and smiled. “I love you so much,” she told him, exhaustion drastically loosening her tongue.

Roose stared at her with his lips parted ever so slightly as she closed her eyes and promptly fell asleep, seeming blissfully unaware that she’d just yanked the world out from under him with three little words.

Betha cackled loudly, the raucous sound of her laughter quickly metamorphosing into a cough she quashed by taking a sip from a goblet of deep red wine one of the servants had brought along with an ornate glass decanter to let it breathe at her behest. Then she raised the goblet with a grin. “Let us all drink to that,” she proclaimed.

Agnes raised her own goblet while Hoster tried and failed to coax his eldest brother into giving him a drink and Roose made no effort to conceal the smirk that ensued. “What precisely are we toasting,” she wondered, “the birth of my great-grandsons or my reticent granddaughter at last experiencing the folly of youth?”

Barbrey made a soft acerbic noise in the back of her throat. “Aye,” she muttered before she poured herself a brimmingly full cup of wine and took a rather unladylike swig without bothering to answer the question her goodmother had asked.

After they all raised a glass, the flock of Blackwoods dispersed and each of them retired to their respective guest chambers. Salvia went to get some—in her words—shuteye and left Alyssum to watch over the twins. Wynne slumbered beside Roose with their newborn sons in her arms whilst Steelshanks informed him that several plants and even trees had uprooted themselves, he presumed in a futile attempt to come to her aid during the ordeal she had suffered in the birthing bed. Under more pleasurable circumstances he enjoyed making her scream, but the wails torn sharp from her throat had pained him like no other sound. Wynne seemed frail, her pale skin damp with cold sweat and soft red gold curls tangled into snarls that would make quite comfortable nests for wayward birds. Barbrey sat at her bedside, looking almost haggard as she watched her precious trueborn daughter sleep.

Bethany had taught him that childbirth took a toll on women, but Roose had never been in the birthing room before and it was a more harrowing experience than he presumed it would be. “Your sister was so kind,” he whispered. “I never knew that such kindness existed, before her. Bethany was a great lady, sweet and dutiful and smart. I might have loved her if she had not seen our marriage as just another duty to fulfill. I would be inside her, but it felt as though she were leagues away. As though I could never touch her, not truly. I bore her no small amount of resentment for that. However, if you think I never grieved for her and every son we lost, you could not be more wrong.”

Then she turned and looked at him with utmost incredulity in her tempestuous eyes. “If you grieved her so, why come to my bed?” Barbrey asked with a scathing edge to her voice. “Was it not because you wanted to see whether you could seduce both sisters? Make a game of it?”

Roose smirked. Barbrey knew him all too well. “Yes,” he said blithely. “There was that, but I am well aware that I was able to seduce you only because you craved for solace as much as I did.”

Barbrey derisively sniffed. “I craved nothing of the sort,” the Widow of Barrowton retorted.

* * *

On the morning of her eighteenth nameday, Wynne sluggishly awoke to the muffled sound of a baby screaming. There was a moment between waking and sleeping when she had forgotten she was now a mother, but that moment shattered once she heard one of her newborn sons crying out. It was a struggle to sit upright with every muscle in her body seeming to whimper in protest, but she finagled herself up onto her elbows and summoned her eyeglasses into her hand. Roose or someone else must have removed them postpartum, because she had no memory of taking them off. Then she opened her third eye and sought out her babies. Avery saw her and flailed his little arms, though he could scarcely control the movement. Nor could he lift his head.

Alyssum was sequestered in her temporary quarters in the midst of changing Rogar, her movements expert and efficient as she wiped him clean with the edges of the cloth he’d soiled and deftly finagled the squirming boy into an unsoiled diaper; the soiled piece of cloth she dumped unceremoniously into a nearby washing tub. One of the chambermaids had been given diaper washing duty because a baby oft went through at least half a dozen if not a full dozen pieces of the soft cloth each day, and that number was doubled with twins.

Thyra, the head laundress, had requested to have the soiled diapers laundered as quickly as possible to prevent the stench of feces and urine from pervading the lady’s chambers or the scullery if they should pile up. It was a method the smallfolk used to care for their own children, those born and raised in the castle. Thyra feeling safe enough to ask her for something that a lady might consider inconvenient but would make things run more smoothly for all the castle staff and their families made Wynne feel as though she truly had changed things at the Dreadfort, and for the better. It wasn’t a request they would have dared to make of Roose.

“Good afternoon, my lady.”

Wynne uttered an undignified noise that sounded like _agh!_ as her lord husband made his presence known to her with a greeting; he sat in a chair by her bedside rather than languishing in bed with her, either to avoid disturbing her slumber or because he wanted to catch her unawares once she awoke. This reaction made him chuckle, his laughter tangled deep in his throat as she whirled indignantly and narrowed her eyes at him behind her eyeglasses. Roose was grinning at her, his expression smug and gleaming with unspoken triumph. What he felt so triumphant about, she did not know. Their sons weren’t even a day old yet, and no magic that she possessed could guarantee they would survive; not even greensight. Upon further observation, she noticed both her mother and grandmother were conspicuously absent. Which told her that Roose had something planned. It couldn’t possibly be carnal in nature, and she was far too weary to play games with him.

“Do you recall what you told me last night?” he asked her.

Wynne frowned as she attempted to recall the night before and shook her head slowly, lest she call forth a migraine. “No,” she answered, “what did I say?”

“Before you succumbed to slumber,” Roose whispered and seemed to gaze at her more intently than he ever had before, “you professed to love me.”

Wynne fought not to gape at him, her exhaustion both enhancing and thwarting her impulse to run from him and the conversation he wanted to have. So her only recourse was attempting to laugh it off, the sound that emerged from her mouth bright and devoid of mirth. “I knew you were cruel,” she whispered back, “but this is too much—”

“And would you still persist in think of this as cruelty if I told you that I feel the same?”

Wynne gasped and shook her head so quickly that she felt the beginnings of a headache burgeoning in her back teeth even as her heart beat so hard she felt as though her chest might burst from the pressure. “_Liar_,” she retorted with a pinch of desperation in her voice because the magic rooted deep within her very bones told her that he was telling the truth. Wynne felt as though she were caught between laughter and tears, and something primal and purely visceral that was neither.

“Not to you,” Roose said, his tone of voice potent and raw and porous with tenderness she had not known he was capable of. “Never. Not unless you ask it of me. I worry for you and I crave the simple pleasure of your company as much as I yearn for your touch upon my skin. When you came down into the dark whilst I flayed those wildlings, I wondered idly whether you might balk at the blood on my hands and for the first time in my life I felt a moment of hesitation because I cared more about what you thought of me than the task at hand. Nobody has ever moved my heart and soul as you do. If that isn’t love, then by all means tell me what you think it might be—”

Then he fell silent because tears had begun to glisten at the corners of her eyes and drip quietly down her cheeks. Roose loathed seeing Wynne cry, and it vexed him that his outpouring of unsightly emotion had brought her to tears. Then she lurched up out of bed, wincing as she fell awkwardly into his lap and took his face in her hands to stop his mouth with a kiss. Roose knew not whether she wanted to kiss him or shut him up, but he permitted himself to bask for a moment in the feeling of her lips on his before he tangled one hand in the hair at her nape and broke the kiss to whisper “I love you.” This he said again and again in between kisses he bestowed upon her tearstained cheeks, the corner of her mouth, her recalcitrant chin.

Wynne groaned softly and sniffled as tears threatened to spill anew. It was truly frightening how every drop of her anxiety had melted away at his touch, like wisps of smoke that she caught glimpses of floating in her periphery but could not grasp. Wynne squirmed in his embrace as her foolish heart unfolded like a flower in the sun and had the audacity to bloom. “And I you,” she mumbled reluctantly before she muttered, “you insufferable man.”


End file.
